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LKO XIII 



AND 



MODERN CIVILIZATION 



J. BI^EKCKER 1V1II.L.KR. 

OF THE NEW YORK BAR. 

A.UTHOR OF ** TRADE ORGANIZATIONS IN POLITICS, OR FEDERALISM 

IN CITIES;" "trade ORGANIZATIONS IN RELIGION;" '*DAS 

ENGLISCHE RECHT UND DAS ROmISCHE RECHT ALS 

ERZEUGNISSE INDO-GERMANISCHER VOLKER," 



•^6 



181P07 



\ 



NKW YORK: 

thp: eskdalk press. 



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i 



Copyright. 

J. BLEECKER MILLER, 

1897. 



3X ^ ^^^ 



From BISHOP POTTER : 

^^ Accept 7ny ihaftks for your 'Leo XIII and 3Iodern 
Civilization.^ It is a very timely and suggestive book^ 
not merely because it traces tke principles of a great 
ecclesiastical policy to its pagan source^ but because it 
reveals the hostility of that policy to American ideals, 
ivhether of the state ^ the family, or the freedom of the 
individual. It is a book for statesmen, for workingmen, 
for parentis y for all loyal citizens to read and ponder; and 
its temperate tone and wide range of authorities ought 
to make it a handbook for all who are concerned for the 
integrity of our institutions and the maintenance of our 
liberties.'' 

From BISHOP DOANE : 
' '/ cotn^nend to the attentive study of our citizens 
the startling and im.po riant facts collected in * Leo XIII 
and Modern Civilization.^ " 

From PROFESSOR BODY 

of the General Theological Seminary : 

*'/ have been much interested in your work on ^Leo 
XIII and Modern Civilization. ' 

**// places the reader in possession of a mass of 
material relative to the aims and policy of the Roman 
Catholic Church, selected from original sources, of great 
interest and information to all Am^erican citizens. The 
importance of the subject can hardly be overrated, and it is 
treated in a way intelligible to all. I was especially struck 
ivith the argumefits 07i astrology as an original factor in 
Roma7Z philosophy. This opens up an apparently new 
line of historical investigation, well worthy of attention. ^^ 



IN^DEX. 



PACE 

[ntroduction 5 

The Church and the State 2S 

The Church and the Workingman 90 

The Church and the Family in 

The Church and the Individual ._ 126 

The Church and Science 155 

Conclusion 1 86 



INTRODUCTION. 

While the booming cannons and pealing bells were 
announcing during the past year that a quarter of a 
century had fled since the defeat of the temporal 
power of the Papal Government by force of arms at 
the Porta Pia, is it not an appropriate time to give a 
few thoughts also to the victory which the Papacy 
won in that same year, in the spiritual field ? 

The war concerning the prerogatives of the Pope 
which was ended by this victory in favor of infalli- 
bility was a long one, extending over centuries, pros- 
ecuted on one side against enormous odds with all 
the sagacity and vigor which has become identified 
with the name of the Society of Jesus, and on the 
other hand with all the learning and piety associated 
with the name of Gallicanism. 

Twenty-five years may seem perhaps too short a 
time to estimate the full effect of a victory, so im- 
portant that men have been willing to toil through 
centuries for its achievement ; but the task is light- 
ened by the fact that the Roman Catholic Church, 
during the greater part of this time, had for its head 
a pontiff of the extraordinary enterprise, vigor and 
learning of Leo XIII., who has not hesitated to use 
to its fullest extent what was probably the greatest 
opportunity for the exercise of power ever given to 
mortal man, by outlining the future of Roman Cath- 
olic thought, in all the chief departments of human 
life. 



6 

As Leo XIII. possesses also the unrestricted power 
of selecting the men who will nominate his successor, 
and has had the similar right of nominating directly 
or indirectly the bishops, clergy and teachers for the 
whole Church during the long period of his pontifi- 
cate, it seems most improbable that any attempt to 
alter the plan laid out by him for the Church's de- 
velopment would be made, even if the very idea of 
the infallibility of its author did not negative the 
possibility of a retreat or of even a criticism. More- 
over irresolution is certainly not a vice of the 
school which has struggled so long and successfully 
for papal predominance, and when we see the first 
use made of this power to be in furtherance of the 
primary doctrines of De Maistre, Cortes and Gous- 
set, we can safely assume that this course will not be 
changed until the attempt has been made to realize 
in practice their ultimate conclusions. 

Cortes, the revivor of Catholicism in Spain and 
director of the studies of Queen Isabella of Spain, 
whose '' Essay on Catholicism " was translated into 
French, with the approval of Pius IX., says : '' Cathol- 
icism is a complete system of civilization. It is so 
complete that in its immensity it includes every- 
thing — the science of God, of angels, of the universe 
and of men. Catholicism controls the body, the 
senses and the souls of men. Its dogmatic theology 
teaches men what they must believe ; its ethics in- 
struct them as to the duties of life. Without Cathol- 
icism there can be neither good sense among the 
lower ranks nor virtue among the middle classes nor 
sanctity among the eminent.'' 



The details of this plan of civilization had not 
however been authoritatively announced by the pre- 
decessors of Leo XIII. The controversy between 
Mr. Gladstone and Cardinal Manning, which sprang 
up at the time of the promulgation of the Vatican 
Decrees, ended with the declaration on the part 
of the Cardinal : '' But what has this to do with 
Civil Allegiance? There is not a syllable on the 
subject (in the Vatican Decrees) ; there is not a 
proposition which can be twisted or tortured into 
such a meaning. For the present it will be enough 
to give the reason why the Vatican Council did 
not touch the question of the relations of the Church 
to the Civil Powers. The reason is simple. It 
intended not to touch them until it could treat them 
fully and as a whole. And it has carefully adhered 
to its intention." {'' Vatican Decrees," pp. 20 and 35.) 

Pius IX. never attempted to supply this omission ; 
his Syllabus of Errors was published long before the 
Vatican Decrees, and besides, being merely in a 
negative form, it was not promulgated by him as a 
whole in the form of an encyclical. He was appar- 
ently content to supply the material — like another 
David, leaving the construction of the temple to his 
successor, the Solomon of the Church. The noise- 
less manner in which the latter has carried on his 
part of the work has concealed it from public atten- 
tion — many would even deny that it had been begun. 

How faithfully Leo XIII. has striven to carry out 
this great undertaking appears from the testimony 
of his most ardent admirers ; in the words of Car- 
dinal SatoUi : '' With regard to sociology, it is an- 



8 

other of the Holy Father's (Leo XIII.) glories at this 
latter end of the 19th century, his Encyclicals are re- 
garded as so many admirable parts of a grand doc- 
trinal system, comprehensive and universal, embra- 
cing all the social sciences, beginning with the funda- 
mental theorems of natural law and going to the 
consideration of the political constitution of States 
and every economic question. " (''Loyalty to Church 
and State," p. 246.) 

In an article by the Rev. J. A. Zahm in the North 
American Review for August, 1895, entitled *' Leo 
XIII. and the Social Question " we read : '' In 1891, 
Leo XIII. promulgated a new economic charter — 
Leo XIII. chose this prophetic hour to make known 
Ihe social evangel to the combatants on both sides. 
As in the politico-religious order Leo XIII. has 
through his Encyclical Immortale Dei, preached the 
code of reconciliation, so has he in the economic 
order, promulgated the charter of social harmony." 

Hov\^ binding on Roman Catholics these opinions 
of the Pope on social and political questions are in- 
tended to be, appears from the Encyclical of Leo 
XIII. to the Belgian Episcopate on the Social Ques- 
tion, dated July 10, 1895 : '' Even amongst the Catho- 
lics of Belgium, whose zeal in carrying out teachings 
of this kind (of Leo XIII. on the social question) is 
most notable, this good fruit has been apparent ; not 
however to such a degree as might have been ex- 
pected from a country and a race so well qualified to 
profit by such teachings. What the obstacle has 
been is well known. Differences of view, enter- 
tained no doubt with good intention, have been ad- 



hered to and maintained in such a manner that the 
full effect of our teachings could not be felt, and 
harmony could not remain complete amongst the 
Catholics. In our opinion, then, the best step to 
take, and one which we most strongly recommend, is 
that you (the Bishops) should meet in congress with 
as little delay as possible. For this social question 
should not be regarded merely under one aspect. It 
certainly is concerned with material welfare, but it 
specially affects religion and morals, and naturally 
comes into relation with the legislation of states ; so 
that in a word, broadly speaking, it has to do with 
the rights and duties of all classes. There can un- 
doubtedly be no Catholic, loving alike his religion 
and his country, who will not be willing to accept 
and observe your prudent decisions. 

'' Wherefore, venerable brethren, we desire you to 
exhort and admonish the Catholics in our name in 
order that henceforth, in matters of this kind, 
whether in the journals, or similar publications, they 
may refrain from all controversy and disputes among 
themselves; still more that they may avoid mutual 
reprimands and may not presume to anticipate the 
decisions of legitimate authority.'' (Catholic Review 
for 1895, page 118). 

We see, therefore, that the laity may be prohibited 
from even discussing a matter of such deep ramifica- 
tions as the social question when once it has been 
passed upon by the successor of St. Peter, but that 
they must quietly ** accept and observe " the decisions 
of his appointees. As Professor Nitti says in his 
** Catholic Socialism'' (p. 381): '* A Papal Encyclical 



lO 

bears a truly absolute character of moral obligation, 
for it is the declaration of a voice which has the 
weight of an absolute moral and spiritual law for 
over two hundred and thirty millions of Catholics/' 

In the official edition of the Encyclicals, by the 
Order of St. Augustine, published at Bruges, in 1887, 
in the introduction they are termed '' the Oracles of 
the Infallible Master." 

The sincere Romanist of to-day has therefore many 
things to believe which were not absolutely neces- 
sary in the days of the Oxford movement or even in 
those of the Gladstone- Manning controversy. Be- 
fore the declaration of the doctrine of infallibility, 
there was room for various opinions as to whether 
the claims for universal sovereignty of the mediae- 
val Popes need be accepted by the faithful ; and 
even after the declaration of that doctrine, there 
might still be doubt as to the exact nature of those 
claims, and as to whether they were applicable to 
modern nations which had thrown off all obedience 
to Rome, as was so earnestly asserted by Cardinal 
Manning in his answer to Mr. Gladstone {^' Vatican 
Decrees,'' p. 79). But since the encyclicals of Leo 
XIII. have announced a definite scheme as to the 
relation of Church and State, there can be no doubt 
on this subject. 

In the same way. Cardinal Manning could write 
to Wilberforce in 1852 (Life of Manning, vol. II., 
page 31): 

^' It (the Church) has no jurisdiction in science or 
philosophy. The office of the Church is Divine and 
unerring within the sphere of the original revelation. 



ir 

But ontology and metaphysics are no part of it. There 
are many philosophies about ' matter ' and ' sub- 
stance/ etc., but none are authoritative. They are 
many because no one has been defined." Since, how- 
ever, the philosophy of one of the Scholastic Doctors 
has received the official sanction of the Infallible 
Head of the Church, this uncertainty no longer 
exists. 

As Cardinal Vaughan declares, concerning the 
recent movement for a reunion of Christendom : 

"The essence of the Anglican position on the 
other hand, and the raison d'etre of the Anglican 
Church, is the negation of the Roman claim. It de- 
clares (i) that the Pope has not authority by a divine 
right bestowed by Christ on blessed Peter, to teach 
and rule the whole Church of God ; (2) that the Pope 
has no jurisdiction in England. The whole question 
of reunion lies, therefore, within a nutshell. It is 
not a question of examining and accepting a long 
list of Catholic doctrines. It is simply a question 
of the fundamental and essential constitution of the 
Church. Did the Divine Founder give to His 
Church a visible head upon earth, with power to 
preach, define, settle controversies, and govern ? I 
fail to see the use of discussing any other subject. 
Settle this matter, and everything falls into its proper 
place and becomes easy. Reject this, and there is no 
basis on which reunion is possible, even though men 
were prepared to affix their signature to every other 
doctrine taught in the Creed of Pope Pius IV." 

Moreover, not only has this plan of world-wide 
government been announced, but a most active 



12 

propaganda has been started in its favor. Leo XIIL 
and his school are perfectly sincere in their belief 
that their plan will certainly make earth as nearly as 
possible resemble Heaven. They throw back the 
charge of ignorance and stupidity, so often hurled 
against their Church, with the greatest vigor and 
honesty, and have not the least fear of their victory 
in an intellectual contest, if the argument be carried 
to its full and fair conclusion. The new University 
at Washington and the Summer Schools throughout 
the country are founded for the express purpose of 
spreading these theories of Church and State. As 
Cardinal SatoUi announced in his remarks on the 
Catholic Summer School ('' Loyalty to Church and 
State," p. 92) : '' And I should be very much pleased 
to see the Catholic Summer School incorporate with 
its object another point of very great importance, 
namely, the presentation to the American people of 
the precise idea of the relations between the Church 
and State. In this matter I find a surprising want of 
knowledge in America. I am speaking about what 
is commonly called Ecclesiastical Law, which pre- 
cisely deals with the fundamental, or rather the 
essential constitution of the Church and the State, 
and determines the limits of action of both author- 
ities in such a way as to prevent the conflicts that un- 
fortunately disturb the social peace and retard social 
progress." 

In the words of Professor Nitti, whose work on 
Catholic Socialism is said by Roman Catholic news- 
papers to have been largely consulted by the Pope 
for his Encyclical on the Labor Question (p. 160): 



13 

'' Now, it is not enough that the teachings and 
examples of Christ be the foundation to our pri- 
vate and public life. We must strive to restore to 
our public and social institutions their former Chris- 
tian character, raising up on the ruins of our present 
pagan legislation another and better, which, like that 
of Charlemagne, may merit to be called the faithful 
follower of canon law, Canonum pedisequa." 

The French Monsignor Mermillord in presenting 
to the Pontiff the representatives of the Union Cath- 
olique d^etudes socials et economiques expressed 
himself to the same effect : 

'' Not only does modern law make no account 
whatever of the laws of the Church, but the ideas 
that had their origin in these laws have been can- 
celled from the public spirit ; the principles bor- 
rowed from the Gospel, and elucidated by the doc- 
tors of the Church, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, 
have been obscured ; all just notions in labor and 
property have been forgotten, decaying, alike the 
obligations of the latter and the rights conferred by 
the former.** 

Leo XIIL is equally positive that the only true 
remedy for all evils of society has been conhded to 
him ; thus he says in his Letter to Cardinal Ram. 
poUa, dated June 15, 1887 : '' The Church possesses^ 
this great wealth, not only for the eternal salvation 
of souls, which is its first work, but also for the 
safety of all human society.'* To the same effect is 
his letter of April 30, 1890, addressed to Italian 
citizens, and the introductory sentences in the En« 
cyclical beginning with the words '' Immortale Dei." 



Whence did Leo XIII. derive his social ideal 
which is being so widely welcomed ? The answer 
is indicated in the extract from the address of 
Monsignor Mermillord, above set forth, where he 
cites St. Thomas Aquinas as the great elucidator 
of those principles whose neglect has caused all 
the woes of modern society. 

Leo XIII. himself has left no doubt as to whom he 
considers the great teacher of the world. In the 
second year of his pontificate, he issued the encyclical 
beginning '' JEterni Patris Filius,'* in which, after ex- 
tolling philosophy in general, he continues as follows : 

'' Now we say that all these admirable and wonder- 
ful prophecies are only to be found in a cor- 
rect use of that philosophy, which the scholastic 
masters, after much painstaking and wise counsel, 
were accustomed to adopt even in theological con- 
troversies Now, as prince and master, 

Thomas Aquinas far outshines every one of the 

scholastic doctors There is no part of 

philosophy that he has not handled fully and thor- 
oughly One can hardly imagine what 

strength, light and help this philosophy can give, 

especially to the study of natural sciences 

Even the Ecumenical Councils, in which shone the 
most brilliant wisdom of the world, vied in doing 
honor to Thomas Aquinas. In the Councils of 
Lyons, Vienna, Florence, and that of the Vatican, 
Thomas assisted, and you might almost say presided 
at the deliberations, and decrees of the Fathers; 
contending with irresistible power and happiest re- 
sults against the errors of Greeks, heretics and 



15 

rationalists. But Thomas's chiefest and special 
honor, and one he shares not in common with any of 
the Catholic Doctors, is, that the Tridentine Fathers, 
in the midst of the conclave for order's sake, desired 
to place the Summa of the Aquinate on the Altar 
beside the books of Sacred Scripture and the decrees 
of the Sovereign Pontiffs, that they might seek therein 

counsel, guidance and light 

'' Again we see the great danger which now threat- 
ens domestic and civil society from the plague of 
perverse opinions, and how much more peaceable 
and secure would either be if a sounder doctrine 
were taught in the academies and schools, and one 
more in conformity with the general teaching of the 
Church, such as is found in the works of St. Thomas 
Aquinas ; and then his treatises on the modern sys- 
tem of liberty, which in our time is tending to 
license, on the Divine origin of authority, on the 
laws and their binding force, on the fatherly, just 
government of sovereign princes, on obedience to 
the higher powers, on mutual charity to all ; these, 
to wit, and other subjects of a like nature, treated of 
by Thomas, have a great and invincible influence m 
rooting out these new principles of right, which are 
recognized as dangerous to order, peace and public 
safety Meantime, let the teachers intel- 
ligently chosen by you, study the doctrine of S. 
Thomas Aquinas, with a view to gently instill it into 
the minds of their pupils, and above all things to set 
forth conspicuously its solidity and excellence ; and 
that the academies, either now instituted or here- 
after to be instituted by you, defend, explain and. 



i6 

use it in refutation of the hardiest and most wide- 
spreading errors/* 

In the succeeding year his Holiness issued another 
proclamation on the same subject, from which the 
following extracts are taken : '' Now, here is the chief 
and summary of the reasons by which we are actu- 
ated : it is, that St. Thomas is the most perfect model 
Catholics can propose to themselves in the various 
branches of science. In him, indeed, are centered 
all the lights of heart and mind which justly com- 
mend imitation His learning is so vast 

that, like the sea, it contains all the wisdom that 

comes down from the ancients For 

these reasons, we deem the Angelic Doctor in every 
respect worthy to be chosen as the patron of all 

students We have been pleased also 

to ask the advice of the Sacred Congregation of 
Rites upon the subject, and their unanimous opinion 
being fully in accord with our wishes, by virtue of 
our supreme authority, for the glory of Almighty 
God and the honor of the Angelic Doctor, for the in- 
crease of learning and the common advantage of 
human society, we declare St. Thomas the Angelic 
Doctor, the Patron of Catholic Universities, Acade- 
mies, Faculties and Schools, and we desire that he 
be by all regarded, venerated and honored as such." 

The foregoing citations are taken from '' Pope Leo 
XIIL," by Rev. James F. Talbot of the R. C. Cathe- 
dral of the Holy Cross, in Boston, (published by 
Garrison & Co., Boston, 1886.) 

On February 20, 1880, Cardinal McCloskey of New 
York, Archbishops Williams of Boston and Wood of 



17 

Philadelphia, together with their fourteen suffragan 
bishops, united in writing Pope Leo a letter, in which 
they said, with reference to the foregoing Encyclical : 
'' On our part we promise to second your desires to 
the best of our powers. We will see that no school 
or seminary of higher studies in our dioceses shall 
fail to imbue its students with the pure doctrine of 
St. Thomas ; and we thank you, Most Holy Father, 
for your vindication of the great Doctor of the 
Church, and for your efforts to promote the true 
progress of all science." 

Father Beckx, the head of the Jesuits, in solemn 
audience, announced the thanks and obedience of 
his order. 

This high appreciation of the writings of St. 
Thomas Aquinas on the part of Leo XIIL, was no 
new thing. As Archbishop of Perugia, in 1872, he had 
established for the study of the works of the Angelic 
Doctor, an Academy which published a series of 
scientific transactions. Immediately after the En- 
cyclical was published, by writing addressed to 
Cardinal de Lucca, dated October 15, 1879, he 
founded a similar institution in Rome and directed 
the publication of a new edition of the writings of 
St. Thomas. In all of his later writings, no chance to 
praise St. Thomas is omitted. 

Great as were these compliments which the infal- 
lible Papacy at its first opportunity showered upon 
the Angel of the Schools, they were not undeserved ; 
for, as this book will endeavor to show, it was he who 
six centuries ago forged the weapons by which the 
victory for infallibility was won and by which the 



i8 

Papacy hopes m the future to gain universal empire. 
Whence had the Pope his admiration for the Angelic 
Dcotor ? 

As the learned Jesuit, Father Harper, says in his 
" Metaphysics of the School '' (Introduction, p. 
LXX.) : '' But I may not omit a special reference to 
that Order to which I belong — the Society of Jesus. 
It tells its members, and particularly its professors 
of Scholastic Theology, that ' Ours are to follow 
entirely in Scholastic Theology the teaching of St. 
Thomas, and to consider him as their own Doctor ; 
and they are to use their utmost exertions to render 
those that follow their lectures as well disposed to- 
wards him as possible/ .... He who has charge 
and supreme supervision in these matters is thus ad- 
monished : ' Let him above all things bear in mind, 
that those who are not well affected towards St. 
Thomas are not to be promoted to the chairs of 
Theology ; and that they who are adverse to him, or 
are even not sufificiently given to the study of him, 
are to be debarred from the office of teaching.' " 

According to Father Talbot {'' Leo XIII.,'* p. 187), 
" the ' Spiritual Exercises * of St. Ignatius is so pene- 
trated with the Thomistic tradition that we may say 
that without the Summa it would have been im- 1 
possible.*' 

As Leo XIII. was educated by the Jesuits, first at 
Viterbo and then at the Collegio Romano in Rome 
(McCarthy's '' Pope Leo XIII.," p. 26), and was after- 
wards ordained in a Jesuit church (an honor said to 
be reserved for members of that order only), his 
glorification of St. Thomas was but the act of a 



19 

docile pupil of Ignatius Loyola. By Brief of July 
13, 1886, he confirmed to the Society of Jesus all 
their powers and privileges, praising them particu- 
larly for spreading the theological and philosophical 
discipline of the Angelic Doctor. 

As Leo Xin. himself declares in his Encyclical 
above mentioned : '' It is admitted that nearly all 
the founders and lawgivers of the religious orders 
have directed their subjects to study, and most con- 
scienti3U3ly, the doctrines of St. Thomas, and with 
this warning, that no one depart with impunity one 
tittle from the footsteps of so great a man. To 
omit the Dominican Family, who glory in this great 
master as by right their own, we find that Benedic- 
tines, Carmelites, Augustinians, the Society of Jesus 
and many other Holy Orders are bound by this 
law as their statutes prove.*' Nothing can exceed 
the adulation which the Roman Catholic writers 
apply to him ; Plassman, the learned professor in the 
college in Rome, says ('' Philosophy," vol. I., p. 29), 
** He is the finger of God,'* and on page 18 id. he 
asks : '' Is it exaggerated to say that to defend St. 
Thomas means to defend the Church?" All of the 
biographers of the Aquinate tell of the appearance 
of our Saviour to him with the words : '' Bene dixisli 
de ine^ Thoma ;" of course, none of the writings of the 
Bible could have a stronger confirmation. 

How highly Cardinal Vaughan appreciates St. 
Thomas Aquinas is shown by the following extract 
from his '' Life " (page 347) : 

'' And in fact the ruling minds at Trent were those 
which had been molded by the great principles 



20 

embedded in the Summa." The spirit of St. Thomas 
lived in its Sessions and seems to have formulated its 
Decrees. . . . On the table of the Council were 
placed conspicuously three books : the Holy Scrip- 
tures, the Decrees of the Popes and the Summa 
Theologica of S. Thomas." 

Cardinal Gibbons, in '' Our Christian Heritage/' 
says in a manner equally emphatic : 

'' St. Thomas Aquinas was, perhaps, the most pro- 
found thinker the world has produced since the 
dawn of Christianity. His vast mind ranges over 
the entire field of philosophy and theology.*' 

But St. Thomas Aquinas in turn lays little claim 
to originality ; he continually appeals to '' the Phil- 
osopher,'' under which title the mediaeval world 
always understood Aristotle, as furnishing the phil- 
osophical groundwork to which the teachings of 
the Bible must be applied. To understand the 
Aquinate, and in turn Leo XIII., it is, therefore, 
necessary to begin with a study of Aristotle, and 
in order to fully appreciate the latest teachings of 
the Roman Pontiff we must often turn to the Prince 
of Philosophers. 

As Harper in his '' Metaphysics of the School " 
(Introduction, p. LXXII.) says : '' I ought not to 
omit another characteristic of St. Thomas — his 
admiration and (it is not too much to say) his rever- 
ence for Aristotle as a philosopher. His moral 
Theology — to repeat v/hat I have said before — is 
built upon the Ethics of the great Stagyrite ; just as 
the morality of the Gospel is based on the natural 
Law. He rarely, if ever, determmes a problem in 



i 



21 

philosophy without summoning the authority of the 
Greek Philosopher to his support ; and whenever he 
quotes him, it is always by the distinctive title of the 

Philosopher They stand absolutely alone ; 

the one the giant of the old world, the other the 
giant of the new." 

As Dr. Plassman says in his first volume (above 
cited), p. 17s : '' She (Aristotelian Philosophy) could 
not be separated from the Summa Theologias and 
the Summa Contra Gentiles of St. Thomas. Where 
the theology of St. Thomas rules, there rules also 
the philosophy of the Peripatetic School." 

Without attempting here to enter upon the ques- 
tion of the merits of this particular philosophy, no 
reader of Roman Catholic controversial literature 
can have failed to note the great advantage which 
familiarity with this philosophical system — extend- 
ing as it does from the mistiest metaphysics to the 
most practical questions of to day — gives to the 
Roman Catholic theologian in presenting his side of 
the case, even when it is intrinsically weak. 

The fact that the successors of the original re- 
formers of the sixteenth century have had compar- 
atively so little influence in continuing the conver- 
sion of Roman Catholics to Protestantism, is probably 
largely due to the ignorance of these successors of 
scholastic philosophy. 

To appreciate the persistence and continuity 
of scholastic teaching we need only remember 
that the race of schoolmen originated in the schools 
established by the Roman Emperors to prepare 
men, fit for the service of the Roman State. With 



22 

the fall of the Empire, the control of these schools 
passed into the hands of the Church, and men 
were educated then to become fit for the service 
of the Roman Church. The decrees of the Codex 
Thedosianus (Lib. XIV., tit. 9), with its provisions 
for full reports to the Emperor on each individual 
student, for the universal study of Latin as the 
medium of communication, etc., present a curious 
parallel to the rules prevalent in the Jesuit schools 
of to-day, the object of the one having* been the 
maintenance of the Roman Empire, and the object - 
of the other the maintenance of its successor, the 
Roman Church. See Hamoden on the Scholastic 
Philosophy of the ^Middle Ages. 

From such schooling independent thought was of 
course not to be expected ; they were trained to 
defend what the Church taught ; they may well be 
described as the intellectual Praetorean Guards of 
the Papacv. Archbishop Trench, in his Mediaeval 
Church History, says : 

(P. 273.) '' The true hearted in every Christian 
land were yearning more and more after a Reforma- 
tion of the Church in its head and in its members. 
But the Schoolmen were not Reformers ; they were 
and always had been defenders of that which was. 
. . . There was nothing which, if it formed part 
of the Church's accepted system, they had not at 
all times shown themselves ready to defend ; the 
most baseless pretentions, the grossest superstition, 
the abuse which was the mushroom growth of yes- 
terday equally with the truth which^had been once 
delivered to the saints. Theo withdrawal of the cup 



23 

from the laity ; transubstantiation, simony if prac- 
ticed by a Pope ; purgatory ; indulgences ; the 
burning of heretics . . . they found reasons, and 
in some sort of fashion, Scripture for all.'* 

Nevertheless, every one who would understand 
modern philosophy ought to familiarize himself 
with the scholastic system. It is impossible to 
understand Des Cartes and his followers, if we 
have no idea of the school in which they were 
brought up, or of the errors which they intended to 
combat. Without understanding Des Cartes, it is in 
turn impossible to understand the philosophers of 
the eighteenth century and of to-day ; without a 
satisfactory philosophy, it is impossible for a thought- 
ful man to arrive at definite conclusions on the most 
essential points of his own religion or to convince 
any, except the most superficial, of its truth. As 
our country becomes old enough to produce a 
leisure class, many will be found who will not rest 
content without at least attempting to solve the great 
riddles of our being which have attracted the strong 
minds of all ages. The study of Roman Catholic 
philosophy, therefore, even if we cannot agree with 
it, will at least make us appreciate the necessity for 
some philosophy and the utter inadequacy of our 
Protestant teaching in this re.^pect. 

Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church is not the 
only one which is infected with the philosophy of 
the heathen Aristotle ; none of the churches, founded 
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are free 
from it, although in some respects, on this account, 
it may be questioned whether Geneva be not nearer 
to Rome than Canterbury. 



H 

The churches founded in the eighteenth century- 
have gone as far in the opposite direction, in con- 
sequence of a natural reaction, so that they, too, 
may ascribe many of their defects indirectly to 
the Stagirite. Hence, if we would have Christian 
unity, one necessary prerequisite seems to be an 
acquaintance with scholastic philosophy, as illus- 
trated on a few points by Fairbairn's '' Unity of the 
Faith." 

Another advantage of this study is to make one 
appreciate how intelligent Roman Catholics can 
honestly love their church and work for its extension 
from pure and unselfish motives. Their philosophy 
is certainly wrong, but it is a philosophy which 
does not shrink from the most difficult and funda- 
mental of life's problems, and therefore compares 
favorably with many superficial and uncertain sys- 
tems, prevalent among Protestants. 

The author has cited mainly Dr. Plassman's Ger- 
man works on the Philosophy of St. Thomas (pub- 
lished at Soest, in Germany, i860, by Nasse), which 
have been recommended by the Rector of one of the 
largest Roman Catholic parishes in this City, a 
Monsignor of the Roman Court, as containing the 
best summary of Thomistic doctrine, and also the 
only English work on the subject, entitled '' Meta- 
physics of the School," by the Jesuit Father Harper 
(published by Macmillan, but now out of print). A 
copy of this book was kindly loaned to the author 
by His Grace Archbishop Corrigan of New York, 
to whom the author is also indebted for the loan of 
the publication containing the official texts of the 



25 

writings of Leo XIII., known as '' Leonis Papae 
XIII. Allocutiones," published by Desclee, De Brou- 
wer & Co., Bruges, Belgium. The translations of 
the Encyclicals in the following chapters have been 
taken, as indicated, from Roman Catholic sources, 
and they have also been compared with the official 
texts and found substantially correct. The Jesuit 
Stonyhurst Series of books on Catholic Philosophy 
(published by Benziger Brothers in New York, 
Cincinnati and Chicago) to which frequent reference 
is also made, is very ably written but is much more 
condensed than Plassman's work. The Catholic Re- 
view, which is frequently cited, is stated to be '' com- 
mended by his Holiness Leo XIII., the Archbishop 
of New York, the Bishop of Brooklyn and many other 
prelates.'' 

The object of the author is not to attempt to con- 
fute the theological teachings of the Roman Catholic 
Church which are not directly derived from scholas- 
tic philosophy, such as the doctrine of the Infallibility 
of the Pope, although he can not forbear in passing to 
refer any one in doubt on this subject to the immense 
Ante-Nicene Literature, translated into English 
within the last few years for the first time ; it is 
submitted that it appears from this plainly enough 
that the few passages therein contained, concern- 
ing pre-eminence of the See of Rome, indicate by 
their context that it was a pre-eminence due to 
the fact that '' all roads lead to Rome," and that 
hence, in the days before the Canon of the Scrip- 
ture was fixed, all traditions were brought to the 
Capitol of the World to be sifted, compared and 



26 

agreed upon. Neither is it the author's intention to 
attempt to set forth and refute the scholastic 
philosophy as a whole. This is a far greater 
task than the author would prv::.u:iic to undertake. 

The object of the following chapters is to show 
merely how that system affects the State by grind- 
ing that institution between its theories of the Church 
and the Workingmen's Guild, as it \yere an upper 
and a nether mill-stone, and then repeating the pro- 
cess with its conceptions of the Family and the 
Individual, until the State is reduced to anmstitution 
intended onl3' to raise taxes and execute criminals. 
How successful this movement has been and how 
important it promises to be«may be ascertained by 
consulting Nitti's Catholic Socialism, or Nippold's 
Kirchengeschicte (volume second), or Lecky 's Liberty 
and Democracy. 

The chapter on the Church and Science is added 
for the purpose of showing the fallacy of the main 
theory of the scholastic physical system, i, e., that all 
motion must come from above, — from beings of a 
higher order than the thing moved,— for it is by 
analogy to this alleged universal principle that the 
dependence of the Individual, Family, Guild, and 
State (in short, of all laymen) upon the Priest-hood 
and of the latter upon the Papacy, is proved. 

The importance of this inquiry will be at once ap- 
preciated w^hen we remember that the Supreme Pon- 
tiff in this country has the unlimited right of ap- 
pointment of all bishops, who in turn control the 
teachers of all schools under Roman Catholic in- 
fiuence, while on the continent of Europe the various 



27 

Concordats give the several governments more or 
less control over nominations of bishops, pastors 
and school teachers. 

That these teachings are really believed in by all 
Roman Catholic laymen or even priests, in spite of 
their proclamation by the highest authority in the 
Church, is not so very probable; those who were 
educated in former days, when a more liberal spirit 
prevailed, will give them at most only a formal 
assent. But enough time has now elapsed since the 
proclamation of the doctrine of the Infallibility and 
of the main principles of the teachings of Leo XIII. to 
allow a new generation, which has been brought 
up on these doctrines, to grow up and enter our 
schools as teachers, and the question becomes now 
an important one, if these principles are dangerous 
to our modern civilization, will Roman Catholic 
schools make good citizens ? 

'' Who has the schools, has the future/' 



CHAPTER L 

THE CHURCH AND THE STATE. 

According to recent statements of the press, larg-e 
numbers of our citizens are enrolling themselves in 
an organization, the object of which is to exclude 
Roman Catholics from public offices. The fact that 
the Roman Catholic press is teeming with denuncia- 
tions of the order, makes it very probable that the 
movement is a large and growing one. A recent 
article in the most conservative of Roman Catholic 
magazmes urged its readers to leave one and join the 
other of the two great political parties, and Cardinal 
Gibbons, in an open letter (published in the Catholic 
Review for x\Iay 23, 1896), has threatened that all 
Roman Catholics will take this course, unless oppo- 
sition to them, as such, ceases. This suggestion has 
already been followed by the institution of the 
Order of Catholic Americans, with the object of 
questioning all candidates as to their opinions 
concerning the right of Roman Catholics to hold 
public office. 

According to the published statement of the 
leader of one of the great political parties in this 
State, the recent murder at the election in Troy was 
due to a feud which grew^ out of this antagonism. 
In many cities the municipal elections were conducted 
avowedly on these lines, especially where the choice 
of officials having charge of public education, was 

28 



29 

involved ; in some States, the nominations for State 
officers are made with reference to this issue, and a 
presidential candidate has been denounced on ac- 
count of his alleged friendliness to Roman Catholics 
in politics. 

Has this Anti-Roman Catholic movement any jus- 
tification ? Is it destined to spread and grow ? Or, 
is it merely a revival of the old Knovz-nothing 
spirit, which will shortly disappear on account of 
its own folly ? 

According to the statement of Roman Catholics, 
there was never a time when such an attack had less 
excuse. Leo XIII. is represented as being favorably 
inclined to the modern liberal spirit ; in France he 
has declared himself in favor of a republic, and 
broken off the long-standing alliance between the 
Papacy and the royal factions ; in our country his 
Ablegate has consorted mainly with the priests who 
represent the liberal American tendency in the 
Church, and his Holiness has expressed himself as 
well pleased with the course of his representative. 

What, then, have the enemies of this Church to 
complain of at this time ? 

Has anything happened since the Know-nothing 
party was laid to rest in its forgotten grave? 

Is all this show of liberalism of the present Pontiff 
and his accredited representative a false pretense 
anda blind, intended merely to cover up designs upon 
our national institutions, so dangerous as to require 
citizens to drop their former party affiliations and 
range themselves in opposition to every candidate for 
public office, who holds the Roman Catholic faith ? 



^.o 



Let us glance at the principal events in the history 
of the Church of Rome since the days of the Know- 
nothing party. 

At that time Roman Catholics could cite the 
Declaration in 1826 of the Vicars Apostolic who 
with Episcopal authority governed the Roman 
Catholics of Great Britain, as follows : 

*' The allegiance which Catholics hold to be due 
and are bound to pay to their Sovereign, and to 
the civil authority of the State is perfect and un- 
divided. 

" They declare that neither the Pope, nor any other 
prelate or ecclesiastical person of the Roman Catholic 
Church .... has any right to interfere, 
directly or indirectly, with civil government, . . . 
nor to oppose in any manner the performance of the 
civil duties which are due to the King.'* 

Moreover there was the Pastoral Address of 
Roman Catholic Hierarchy of the same year; they 
declared on oath their belief '' that it is not an article 
of the Catholic Faith, neither are they thereby re- 
quired to believe that the Pope is infallible." 

In this country, they could also point to Keenan*s 
Doctrinal Catechism, approved by Bishop Hughes, 
which contains the following (p. 305): *^ What if a 
General Council or Papal Consistory should under- 
take to depose a king, or absolve his subjects from 
their obedience ? 

''Answer : No Catholic is bound to submit to such 
a decree. Indeed every Catholic may renounce 
upon oath any such doctrine, and this without the 
least breach of Catholic principle, 



31 

" Question : Must not Catholics believe the Pope 
in himself to be infallible ? 

'* Answer : This is a Protestant invention, it is no 
article of the Catholic faith/' 

Pius IX., as above set forth, published no positive 
plan on the general subject of the relation of Church 
and State ; the Syllabus of Errors being merely a 
negation of certain doctrines, and, moreover of 
uncertain authority. Has Leo XIIL, the omnipotent 
superintendent of Roman Catholic schools, advanced 
or receded from the position of the Irish Bishops and 
Bishop Hughes ? 

In the first place, what are the teachings on the 
relation of Church and State of the Angel of the 
Schools, St. Thomas Aquinas, whom Leo XIII., as 
above set forth, has lauded so highly, and whose 
doctrines, according to his directions, all Roman 
Catholic teachers are '' to gently instill into the 
minds of their pupils " ? 

In the passage from the Encyclical above cited, in 
which St. Thomas is extolled as offering great safe- 
guards to the modern Family and State, particular 
mention is made of his treatise ''on the fatherly, just 
government of sovereign princes." 

The treatise '' De regimine principum " is evidently 
intended ; what are its teachmgs concerning the 
science of government, and particularly on the rela- 
tions of Church and State ? 

After setting forth the advantages which render 
a monarchy the most desirable form of government 
(*' since states which are not ruled by one, labor under 
dissentions and are tossed about without peace ") 



32 

he proceeds in Chapter XIV. of the First Book to 
state the relation of Church and State as follows : 

*' If indeed men could attain this end (heaven) by- 
human nature, it would be necessar}^ that it should 
be the king's duty to guide men towards this 

end A government is higher in 

proportion to its aim But since 

man attains the end of divine enjoyment not 
by human but by divine virtue, to guide toward 
that end will be the duty not of human but of divine 
government. Therefore the administration of this 
government, in order that spiritual matters should 
be distinct from earthly matters, is committed not to 
earthly kings but to priests, and especially to the 
highest priest, the successor of St. Peter, the vicar 
of Christ, the Roman Pontiff, to whom all kings of 
the Christian people should be subject as to our Lord 
Jesus Christ himself. For thus those who direct 
towards inferior ends should be subject to him who 
directs to the ultimate end. . . . Hence in the 
law of Christ, kings shall be subjects to priests." 

In Chapter X. of the Third Book, he treats of the 
rank of dignitaries as follows : ^^ If then our Lord 
Jesus Christ is so called (priest and king) as Augustine 
proves (7 de Civit. Dei) it does not appear incon- 
gruous so to call his successor ... In the 
Supreme Pontiff is all grace, for he alone confers full 
indulgence for all sins . . . This cannot be re- 
ferred merely to spiritual, because the corporal and 
temporal depend from the spiritual and eternal, 
as the operation of the body from the virtue of the soul. 
As, therefore, the body has through the soul, virtue 



33 

and movement, as appears from the words of the 
Philosopher (Aristotle) and Augustine on the Im- 
mortality of the Soul, so the temporal jurisdiction of 
princes depends on the spiritual jurisdiction of Peter -2y 
and his successor. Which argument, indeed, we can 
assume from those things which we find in the 
writings and deeds of the Supreme Pontiffs and of the 
Emperors, because they (the Emperors) yielded to 
the latter in temporal jurisdiction. First, this ap- 
pears, indeed, concerning Constantine, who yielded 
to Sylvester in the Government . . . But 
from the deposition of princes, made by apostolic 
authority, sufficiently appears their (the Popes') 
power. First, indeed, we find this power to have been 
exercised by Zacharia over the King of the Franks, 
since he deposed him from the throne and absolved 
all his barons from the oath of fidelity. 
The same we find concerning Innocent III. who 
took the empire from Otto IV. And the same hap- 
pened to Frederick II." 

These teachings are repeated in the most cele- 
brated work of St. Thomas, the ^' SummaTheologise.'* 

Thus he says in Summa II., 11. , q. lo, a. ii : *' Hu- 
man government is derived from divine and should 
imitate it ; " and again in Summa II., II., q. 60, a. 6 : 
'' For the temporal power is subject to the spiritual as 
the body to the soul, therefore it is not a usurpation of \ 
jurisdiction if a spiritual prelate intrude himself into 
temporal affairs ; " and again in Summa L, II., q. 96, a. 
4 : '' And such laws (which are opposed to the divine 
law) should in no way be observed." 

Assuming that the foregoing extracts show suffi- 



34 

ciently the teachings of St. Thomas, on the manner in 
which Roman Catholics should regard the relations of 
the Church to the State, let us consider a few pas- 
sages which throw light upon the manner in which 
they should treat their fellow citizens of other 
religious beliefs. 

Summa II., II., q. 1 1, a. 3 : '^ Heresy is a sin on the 
part of heretics for which they deserve not only to 
be separated from the Church by excommunication, 
but also to br killed . . . Although heretics on 
account of their sin are not to be endured, yet until 
their second relapse from the faith one should wait, in 
order that they may return to the faith ; but they who 
after a second relapse remain obstinate in their error, 
are not only to be excommunicated, but also handed 
over to the secular princes to be exterminated.'* 

Summa II., II., q. 39, a. 4 : '^ A schismatic commits a 
double sin. First because he separates himself from 
communion with members of the Church, and for 
this the proper punishment of schismatics is that 
they should be excommunicated ; secondly, because 
they refuse to be subject to the head of the Church, 
and therefore because they will not be coerced by 
the spiritual power of the Church, it is just that 
they should be coerced by the temporal power.*' 

Summa II., II., q. 10, a. 8: *' And therefore 
heretics are to be compelled to remain in the 
faith No one of us wishes any here- 
tics to perish. But the House of David did not 
deserve peace unless Absalom his son was killed in 
the war which he was carrying on against his father. 
So the Catholic Church, if by the destruction of 



35 

some it collects others, heals the sorrow of its moth- 
erly heart by the liberation of so many people.'* The 
last sentence is in answer to the objection : " In 
Ezekiel, Chapter i8, it is said from God: I desire 
not the death of a sinner. But we should conform 
our will to the divine. Therefore we oug-ht not to 
wish that infidels be killed." 

Summa II., II., q. lo, a. 9 : " The Church under pun- 
ishment, forbids the faithful to have intercourse with 
infidels, who deviate from the received faith, either 
by corrupting it, as heretics do, or by completely 
leaving it as apostates do." 

Summa II., II., q. 10, a. 10: '' Infidels are not to as- 
sume government or leadership of the faithful ; this 
would be a danger and scandal to the faith ; but if 
such governments exist they may be endured to 
avoid scandal. . . . But such rule can justly by 
the sentence or decree of the Church be ended ; be- 
cause infidels on account of their infidelity worthily 
deserve to lose their power over the faithful, who 
are the sons of God." 

Summa II., II., q. 10, a. 11 : '^ Because the Jews ob- 
serve rites in which the truth of the faith is pre- 
dicted, their worship is to be tolerated. . . . The 
rites of infidels which contribute something of use or 
truth to the faithful are to be tolerated ; but other 
rites are in no manner to be tolerated, except to 
avoid scandal." 

The fate of our Hebrew fellow citizens, however, 
is not altogether a happy one, as appears from the 
following extract from a letter of the Angelic Doctor 
to the Duchess of Brabant : 



36 

'' In the first place your Excellency inquires 
whether it is lawful at any time, and if so at what 
time, to make exactions from the Jews. To which 
question, so absolutely proposed, one can reply that, 
as the laws teach, the Jews on account of their sin 
are liable to perpetual servitude and their terrestrial 
lords can take the property of the Jews as their own ; 
but in this, moderation should be observed so that 
the necessaries of life should not be taken from 
them. . . . Lastly you inquire whether through- 
out your Province Jews should wear a sign by 
which they could be distinguished from Christians. 
To which the plain answer is that according to a 
statute of a General Council, Jews of either sex in 
all Christian lands and in all times ought to be dis- 
tinguished by some dress from the rest of the people." 

Many Roman Catholics will of course say that these 
doctrines of Thomas Aquinas are antiquated and 
that they no longer are applicable, in this nineteenth 
century. Let us consider them in turn and see if 
they have not been in principle reaffirmed in our day. 

To begin with the claim of St. Thomas that 
Popes can depose princes : Pius IX. expressly recog- 
nized the right of the Popes so to do, in his address 
to the Academy of the Catholic Religion, July 20, 
1871 (Discorsi del Sommo Pontifici Pio IX., p. 203) : 
** Among the other errors, the most malicious is that 
which would attribute to it (the doctrine of infalli- 
bility) the right to depose sovereigns and free a 
people from its oath of fidelity. This right, without 
doubt, has at some times in extreme circumstances 
been exercised by the sovereign Pontiffs, but this 



has nothing to do with Papal infallibility. Nor is its 
source the infallibility, but . . . the Pontifical 
authority y 

In this declaration, the late Pontiff was only fol- 
lowing the leading Roman Catholic publicist of this 
century, De Maistre, who in his "' Du Pape '* (page 
176) declares: '* The Sovereign Pontiff m freeing 
subjects from their oath of allegiance would do 
nothing against the divine law/' 

Let us next consider the last extract from the opin- 
ions of St. Thomas, showing his antipathy to the 
Hebrews. That this spirit is not dead is proved by 
the fact that the Anti-Semitic party in Austria is in 
fact a Roman Catholic party and receives its name 
only from its first demand, i. e., the restriction of 
Hebrew enterprise by special laws. 

The following recent incident in the Austrian 
Reichsrath is characteristic of the movement and 
the statements of Dr. Lueger have not been denied 
by papal authorities, although ample time to do so 
has elapsed. 

*'One of the members, Herr Noske, said that 
there were priests in Vienna who preached from 
the pulpit, exciting the people against their Jewish 
fellow citizens. A poor woman living in the country 
had adopted a foundling from Vienna, who happened 
to be a Jew. She informed the parish priest of the 
circumstance, and was roundly abused by him for 
bringing a Jew to the locality. The child subse- 
quently died. The priest refused to bury it in the 
graveyard. It was consequently interred in a field, 
and only transferred to the graveyard through the 



38 

intervention of the authorities. Herr Noske asked 
when some Primate of the church would raise his 
voice against such practices and preach that religion 
which taught men to love their neighbors as them- 
selves. He reminded the House that the Prime 
Minister had recently affirmed the government to be 
of the opinion that true Christianity demanded toler- 
ance. Herr Lueger, in -response, declared that not 
a single bishop would be found to condemn the 
Anti-Semites. He said : ^ We are proud to say that 
our movement has revived religious feeling in 
Vienna. ... If a bishop could be found to approve 
of your party and to oppose the efforts of the Chris 
tians, such an ecclesiastic would be capable of cruci- 
fying our Lord a second time ; he would be perpe- 
trating the blackest crime against religion, and 
would be doing what the Pope must condemn. You 
may rest assured that the Holy Father in Rome is 
well enough informed as to the situation in Vienna 
to know on which side are the friends of the Cath- 
olic religion. We are quite reassured on that score, 
and are sure of the Pope. We know that he will 
not desert us in the holy war which we are carrying 
on in Vienna and in Austria generally.* '' 

Since this event, Dr. Lueger has been elected 
again to the Burgomastership of Vienna, as* the 
Anti-Semetic Candidate — a movement which the 
Catholic Review of May i6, 1896, declares to be 
*^ largely recruited from the Catholic party." See 
also to the same affect the chapter in Professor 
Nitti's *' Catholic Socialism,'' entitled '' Antisemitism 
and Catholic Socialism in Austria.'* 



39 

Evidence that the persecuting spirit of the Church 
in general still survives is given by the manner in 
which Leo XIII. has condemned the Freemasons to 
suffer temporal punishments for their beliefs. In 
his Encyclical ^^ Humanum genus *' (cited in ^' Pope 
Leo XIIL/' compiled by Rev. James F. Talbot, 
D.D., of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, 
Mass , and printed by Martin Garrison & Co., Bos- 
ton, 1886), the Holy Father says: '' The first to de- 
nounce this danger (Freemasonry) was Clement 
Xn., in the year 1738 ; and his Constitution was con- 
firmed and renewed by Benedict XIV.; Pius VIL 
followed in the footsteps of these Pontiffs ; and Leo 
XII. in his Apostolic Constitution Quo graviora, 
collecting the acts and decrees on this subject of the 
Popes who had gone before him, ratified and con- 
firmed them for all time. Pius VIII., Gregory XVI. 
and, on many occasions, Pius IX. have spoken in the 
same sense. . * . . Therefore, whatever the Roman 
Pontiffs, our predecessors, have decreed for hindering 
the undertakings and attempts of the sect of the Free- 
masons ; whatsoever they have sanctioned, either 
for the purpose of deterring men from, or calling 
them back after they have entered those societies, — 
all these, each and every one, we hereby notify, and 
with our apostolic authority confirm ; in which, in- 
deed, trusting especially to the good will of Chris- 
tian people, we beg each by his own salvation that 
they will make it a matter of conscience not in the 
smallest way to depart from the previous commands 
of apostolic authority in this matter.'* 

The following is an extract from the Apostolic 



y 



40 

Constitution of Leo XII., '' Quo graviora," confirmed 
by Leo XIIL,as above stated : '' Moreover, we will 
and command that all bishops, prelates, superiors 
and inquisitors of heresy give information and pro- 
ceed against said transgressors of whatever estate, 
condition, rank or dignity they may be, that they re- 
press and punish them with merited punishments 
as strongly suspected of heresy ; for we give to them 
and each of them, the free power to inform and pro- 
ceed against said transgressors, to repress and punish 
them Avith the merited punishments, in invoking 
even for this purpose the help of the secular arm." 
We see therefore that Leo XIII. begs all Christian 
people '' each by his own salvation that they will 
make it a matter of conscience '' to proceed against 
all Freemasons, '' invoking even for this purpose the 
secular arm." 

By consulting the Encyclical on Freemasonry, 
it will also be found that Freemasons are con- 
demned for the reason that they form a part of 
the sect of Naturalists, who are thus described : '' It 
is the first principle of those who call themselves 
Naturalists, since by their very name they declare it, 
that human nature and human reason should be in 
all things the teacher and ruler ; and this laid down, 
they either pay less attention to duties towards God. 
or they pervert them by indefinite and erroneous 
opinions. For they deny that any thing has been 
revealed to us by God Himself ; they admit no dog- 
mas of religion — that nothing is true but what 
human intelligence can understand ; that there is no 
teacher whom we are to believe on account of the 
authority of his office.'' 



41 

In his Encyclical on Human Liberty, dated June 20, 
1888, all men who call themselves Liberals in politics 
are expressly condemned as belonging to this school of 
Naturalists. It follows therefore logically that all who 
advocate these '^ liberal principles " of the Naturalists, 
ought also to be handed over to " the secular arm." 

How welcome are converts driven into the Church 
for fear of " the secular arm." See '' Armenia and 
the Powers " in the Contemporary Review of May, 
1896, and Nippold's " Handbuch der Neuesten 
Kirchengeschichte " (pubhshed by Wiegandt and 
Schotte, Berlin, 1890), second volume, p. 225. 

How wide should be the separation which is to 
exist between Roman Catholics and their fellow citi- 
zens, even in this country, is shown by the following 
command of Leo XIII., published during the past 
year, with especial reference to circumstances in 
America. The wide scope of this prohibition will be 
better understood when we consider how broad a 
field the term '^ correct morals '' covers in Roman 
Catholic phraseology ; it is held to embrace all inten- 
tional human acts, as will be shown below in this 
chapter, and as has been already indicated in the 
above cited Encyclical to the Belgian Bishops, in 
which the Social Question is declared to fall under 
the head of ''religion and morals," — the very two 
terms used in the following letter : 

** We have learned that in the United States con- 
ventions are sometimes held in which people assem- 
ble promiscuously. Catholics as well as those of other 
denominations, to treat upon religious subjects as 
well as upon correct morals. In this we recognize the 
desire for religious things by which this people is 



42 

animated more zealously from day to day, but al- 
though these promiscuous conventions have unto 
this day been tolerated with prudent silence, it would 
nevertheless seem more advisable that the Catholics 
should hold their conventions separately ; and that, 
lest the utility of these conventions should result 
simply to their own benefit, they might be called 
with the understanding that the admittance should 
be open to all, including those who are outside of the 
Church/' It follows, therefore, that consistent 
Roman Catholics should attend no meeting for 
benevolent, social or political purposes, which is not 
called and managed exclusively by Roman Catholics, 
although others may be admitted. 

It will, perhaps, be claimed, in spite of the forego- 
ing evidence of modern intolerance, that the infallible 
head of the Roman Church was ignorant of these pas- 
sages in the writings of the Angelic Doctor as to the 
relation of Church and State ; but this would be, 
firstly, a grave reflection upon the theological educa- 
tion of his Holiness ; how important a knowledge of 
scholastic literature is deemed in the church is shown 
by the fact that one of the propositions condemned 
by Pius IX. in his Syllabus of Errors was that ** the 
methods and principles by which the old Scholastic 
Doctors cultivated theology are no longer suitable to 
the demands of the age and the progress of science," 
and every one admits that Leo XIII. is probably 
one of the best, read ecclesiastics in his Church. 

Moreover, if we look at the Encyclicals of Leo 
XIII. we find that as becomes a faithful scholar 
of the Jesuits, they breathe the very spirit of St. 
Thomas, and that when speaking of the relation 



43 

of Church and State he takes his figures of speech 
literally from that author. It may here be noted 
that the obedience to God, to which his Holiness 
so often refers, will be shown in a later part of 
this chapter and in chapter fourth, to mean obedi- 
ence to the Pontifex Maximus. 

In the opening sentence of the Encyclical last 
above cited, he announces that Christ '' left the 
Church which He had founded as the supreme ruler 
of all people." This idea is developed in the Ency- 
clical on the Christian Constitution of States, begin- 
ning with the words, ^^ Immortale Dei'' (translated 
from Latin Text of the ^' Osservatore Romano " by 
Rev. T. F. Mahar, D. D., Catholic Universe Pub- 
lishing Co., Cleveland, Ohio) : 

^' This society (the Church), though consisting of 
men, like civil society, nevertheless on account of 
its aim and the means which it uses for its purpose, 
is supernatural and spiritual and, therefore, it is dis- 
tinct and different from civil society, and what is of 
very great moment, is a perfect society in kind and 
in law, since it possesses of itself by the will and 
benefit of its founder, all the aids necessary to its 
security and its action. Since the aim of the 
Church is by far the noblest, so its power is of all 
the highest, and can never be considered inferior to 
civil authority, or in any Avay subject to it. In truth 
Jesus Christ gave to his Apostles free mandate as to 
sacred things, adding the power of making laws in 
the true sense of the word and the consequent two- 
fold power of judging and of punishing. The 
leader of men to heavenly things is not the State 



44 

but the Church, and to her the charge has been as- 
signed, by God, that she should look to and decree 
in those things that concern religion ; that she 
should teach all nations ; that she should extend the 
bounds of Christianity as far as possible, in short 
that she should administer all Christianity freely and 
readily according to her own judgment. This au- 
thority, absolute in itself and plainly independent, 
which has long been denied by the philosophy that 
flatters princes, the Church has never ceased to as- 
sert for herself and also to publicly exercise, first of 
all the Apostles themselves asserting it, who, when 
forbidden by the rulers of the synagogue to spread 
the Gospel, answered with constancy, ' We ought 
to obey God rather than men/ The Holy Fathers 
of the Church according to opportunity labored to 
establish by arguments this same power, and 
the Roman Pontiffs, with unconquerable constancy, 
never failed to vindicate it for themselves against 
opponents. Still more, princes themselves and 
Governors of States approved this power by words 
and b}' deeds, by compacts, by transaction of affairs, 
by sending and receiving ambassadors and thus 
acting with the Church as with a supreme lawful 
power. Nor surely is it to be held that it was with- 
out a special providence of God that this same 
power was made secure by a civil princedom as the 
best assurance of its liberty. 

*' Therefore God has divided the guidance of the 
human race between two powers, the ecclesiastical 
and the civil, the one looking to divine and the 
other to human affairs. Each is greatest of its kind ; 



45 

each has certain bounds determined by the nature 
and proximate cause of each, whence a circle, as it 
were, is drawn in which each may lawfully act. 
But since the power of both is over the same per- 
sons and hence it may happen that one and the 
same thing may come, although in different ways, 
under the law and judgment of both, a God of 
supreme providence, who is the author of both, 
must have accurately and harmoniously traced the 
course of both. ' Those that are, are ordained of 
God/ Were it not so, causes of destructive conten- 
tion and strife would often arise and man would 
frequently have to stop in doubt and hesitancy like 
one with two roads before him, anxious as to what 
he should do in the presence of two conflicting au- 
thorities, neither of which can be conscientiously 
rejected. Such a condition is in the highest degree 
repugnant to the wisdom and goodness of God who 
even in the physical world, though it is of far in- 
ferior rank, nevertheless has so disposed and har- 
monized natural powers and causes that one is not an 
obstacle to another, and all fittingly and accurately 
combine to attain the purpose of the universe. 
There must be, therefore, a harmony between the 
two powers and it is not unduly compared to the union 
between the body and soul in man. Its character and 
extent cannot be judged except by considering, as 
we have said, the nature of both and taking into ac- 
count the excellency and nobility of their purposes ; 
one having as immediate and chief aim the benefits of 
mortal things, and the other aiming to provide 
heavenly and eternal blessings." 



46 

The same figure of speech is used in the Encyclical 
De Libertate Humana, dated June 20, 1888 (Leonis 
Papae AUocutiones, voj. III., p. 96) : ''And the concord 
(of civil and religious government) not inaptly has 
been compared to that which exists between soul 
and body, for the benefit of both ; the division of 
which is especially injurious to the body, whose life 
is thereby extinguished." 

It will be noted that after following the same line 
of argument about the division of the guidance of 
the human race between the Church and State, 
the figure which Leo XIIl. and Aquinas both 
employ to express the relation of Church and 
State is that of the soul and the body. The nature 
of this relation of the soul to the body is not an 
open question to Roman Catholics : the Ecumen- 
ical Council of Vienne (131 1) declared (Plassmann*s 
Psychology, p. 207) : '' Quod quisquis deinceps 
asserere, defendere seu tenere pertinaciter prassum- 
serit, quod anima rationalis seu intellectiva non sit 
forma humani corporis per se et essentialiter, tan- 
quam hereticus sit censendus *' (that whosoever 
shall presume to assert, defend or pertinaciously to 
hold that the rational or intellectual soiil is not by 
itself and essentially the form of the human body, is 
to be considered a heretic). This doctrine is re- 
peated in the Fifth Council of the Lateran (15 12). 
We see therefore that it has been dogmatically de- 
clared that the soul is the form of the body. The 
same doctrine has been repeated in the Apostolic 
Letters of Pope Pius IX. to the Archbishop of 
Cologne, in which the Pontiff, condemning the errors 
of Guenthcr, declares it to be Catholic doctrine that 



47 

the rational soul in man is the true, per se and imme- 
diate form of the body ; see Liberatore on Univer- 
sals (translated by Bering), page io8. 

St. Thomas Aquinas develops this theory at length 
in his Contra Gentiles (Lib. II., Cap. LVIL), following, 
of course, his master Aristotle (De Anima, 11. , Ch. 2), 
who had declared that the soul was that by which man 
lives, feels, perceives, wills, moves, and understands. 

Now, what does it mean to be the form of a body, 
according to Roman Catholic psychology ? 

St. Thomas's teachings ^on this subject are shown 
by the following ^extracts from his writings : 
Summa I., q. 78 a. i : '' For the whole bodily na- 
ture is subject to the soul, and stands to it in the 
nature of matter and instrument." — Prologus in 
12 libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis : ''When 
several parts are united it is necessary that one 
of them should be the regulator or ruler, and the 
other the regulated or ruled. This also appears in 
the union of soul and body. For the soul naturally 
commands and the body obeys/' Summa 1., q. 76, a. i : 
'' But it must be considered that as the form becomes 
nobler so much the more it dominates the corporal 
substance . . . the human soul is the noblest of 
forms." Summa I., II. q. 58 a. 2 : '' The soul rules the 
body with a despotic government as a master rules 
a slave who has no right of contradiction." Aris- 
totle had taught the same in his Ethics (Book 8, ch. 
13), where he declares that the relation of a tyrant, 
not a king, to his subject, or an artisan to his tool, to 
be the same as that of the soul to the body. In 
modern Roman Catholic philosophies this teaching 



48 

is, of course, repeated, as in Dr. Plassmann's Psy- 
chology (p. 228), where it appears how broad and 
important this doctrine is to the whole scholastic 
or Aristotelian theory : '' In every living being, 
even when it unites all kinds of life, — as is the case in 
man, — there is only one soul. This single soul per- 
forms all acts of life, whether it be vegetable, sensi- 
tive or rational." 

Ignatius Loyola had evidently the sam^e illustra- 
tion in view which Aristotle used, as above cited, 
when he declared that his followers must be as ready 
to fulfill the will of their superiors as a stick or a 
corpse in the hands of a man ; and Dr. DoUinger, in 
his '' History," while still a Roman Catholic, used 
this comparison of the relation of Church and State 
to that existing between the soul and the body to 
sum up the most extreme claims of the mediaeval 
Papacy as declared in the bull of Boniface VIII. , 
known as ^' Unam sanctam." 

Dr. Dollinger's statement is as follows (IV. p. 91) : 
*' In the Church, it (the Bull ' Unum sanctam ') 
says, there are two powers, a temporal and spiritual, 
and as far as they are both in the Church they have 
both the same end ; the temporal, the inferior, is 
subject to the spiritual, the higher and more noble ; 
the former must be guided and directed by the latter 
as the body is by the soul; it receives from the spiritual 
its consecration and its direction to its highest object, 
and must, therefore, should it ever depart from its 
destined path, be corrected by the spiritual power. 
It is a truth of faith that all men, even kings, are 
subject to the Pope/' 



49 

We see, therefore, that any student acquainted 
with the first principles of Roman Catholic dogma and 
philosophy would at once understand the declara- 
tion of Leo XIIL that Church and State are related 
to each other as soul and body ; it means that tne 
Church is all powerful, and that the State exists and 
moves only thanks to the Church, and that one's 
duty as a member of the State is to be as completely 
subservient to the representatives of the Church as 
a member of the Jesuit Order is to his superiors, 
/. ^., as a stick or a corpse in the hand of a man. 

The student of St. Thomas would, moreover, be 
expressly taught the passage above cited, from his 
De Regimine Principum (Lib. IIL, Cap. X.): '^As, 
therefore, the body has through the soul, virtue and 
movement, as appears from the words of the phi- 
losopher (Aristotle) and Augustine on the Immor- 
tality of the Soul, so the temporal jurisdiction of 
princes depends on the spiritual jurisdiction of Peter 
and his successor." 

Nor has His Holiness shrunk from using this 
authority to lay under the ban as frankly as Pius 
IX. did, all that modern civilization holds most 
dear, as appears by the following extracts from the 
Encyclical Immortale Dei (above cited) : 

'' But those pernicious and deplorable revolution- 
ary tendencies which were aroused in the i6th cen- 
tury, when they had once introduced confusion into 
Christianity, and soon by a natural course entered 
the domain of philosophy and from philosophy into 
all the lines of civil society. From this source are 
to be traced the more recent declarations of unbri- 



50 

died liberty, invented during the great upheavals of 
the last century and laid down as the principles and 
fundamentals of the new law, which was before un- 
known and is at variance on more than one score 
not only with Christianity, but even with the law of 
nature. Of those principles the chief is that all 
men, as they are of one species, are also really equal 
in practical life ; that every man is so far independ- 
ent as to be subject in no way to the authority of 
another ; that he is free to think as he pleases, to act 
as he pleases ; that the right of governing resides in 
no person. In a society thus constituted, there is 
no princedom except the will of the people ; the 
people are in their own hands and alone rule them- 
selves ; they select persons to whom they entrust 
themselves, in such manner, however, as not to 
transfer the right to rule, but merely a charge to be 
exercised in their name. Divine control is ignored, 
as if there were no God at all, or he were nowise solic- 
itous concerning human society ; or as if men individ- 
ually or united together in society owed nothing to 
God, or as if any princedom could be imagined 
whose cause, force and authority did not reside en- 
tirely in God. In this way the State is nothing but 
the multitude, mistress and ruler of itself, and since 
the people is declared as holding within itself the 
source of all rights and all power, it follows that the 
State should consider itself bound by no manner of 
duty to God ; that it should profess publicly no re- 
ligion ; that it should not seek out of many that 
which alone is true, nor prefer a certain one to the 
rest, nor favor one principally, but to give to each 



51 

an equality before the law with the limit that public 
order be not disturbed. It is in harmony with this 
to leave all questions of religion to the judgment of 
each individual ; to permit every one to follow such 
as he pleases, or none at all if he accept none. 
Hence surely arise, a conscience without law to 
determine its decision, freedom of opinion as to the 
worship of God, or not worshiping Him ; a boundless 
license of thought and of the press. 

*' Having once laid down these tenets, which in our 
time are highly approved, as the fundamental prin- 
ciples of the State, it easily appears into what and 
how iniquitous a position the Church is forced. 
For when the conduct of affairs is in accordance 
with these doctrines Catholicity is placed on an equal 
footing in the State with associations foreign to her, 
or even on an inferior footing ; no account is taken of 
ecclesiastical laws ; the Church which ought, accord- 
ing to the command and mandate of Jesus Christ, to 
teach all nations, is commanded not to affect the 
public character of the people. Those things which 
enter into both ecclesiastical and civil law are legis- 
lated upon by the civil rulers according to their own 
judgment, and they disregard in these matters the 
most sacred laws of the Chureh. Wherefore juris- 
diction is usurped over Christian marriage, even the 
marriage bond, the unity, the permanency of mar- 
riage becoming the subject of civil determination ; 
the possessions of the clergy are disturbed, the 
Church being denied the right of holding property. 
To sum up the whole matter, they act towards the 
Church as if having divested her of the character of 



52 

a society perfect in kind and law, she were consid- 
ered precisely the same as other associations which 
the State contains ; and for this reason whatever 
right she possesses, whatever liberty of action she 
possesses, she is declared to hold by the concession 
and beneficence of the civil rulers. 

'^ In view of these dangers, no doubt, is left as to 
the duty of Roman Catholics. . . . 

'' Therefore in the difficult course of affairs which 
is pursued. Catholics, if they will listen to us as they 
ought, will easily see what are their duties, both as 
to opinions and as to deeds. As to forming opinions, 
whatever the Roman Pontiffs have taught or shall 
teach must all receive a firm assent and be openly 
professed when occasion demands it. And especially 
as to modern liberties Catholics must abide by the 
judgment of the Apostolic See and each and every 
one hold what it holds. Experience has sufficiently 
taught their effect upon the State ; they have every- 
where produced results that are a just cause of grief 
to the virtuous and Avise . . . Wherefore it is 
clear that Catholics have just reason to enter into 
political life ; for they do not enter it, nor ought they 
to enter it, for the purpose of sanctioning what in 
our times is vicious in the character of public affairs; 
but for the purpose of turning this very character as 
far as possible into honest and genuine public profit, 
having in mind the purpose of introducing the 
wholesome life-bxood of Catholic wisdom and virtue 
into the whole system of the State. . . . All 
Catholics who are worthy of the name must first of 
all be and wish to appear most affectionate children 



53 

of the Church ; reject unhesitatingly whatever is 
inconsistent with that encomium ; use popular insti- 
tutions as far as virtue permits, for the protection of 
truth and justice; see that liberty of action does not 
pass beyond the bounds fixed by the law of nature 
and of God ; work to the end that every state be 
made conformable to the Christian model we have 
described. Tl'ie manner of obtaining these things 
cannot be determined by one fixed rule, since the 
method must be suitable to times and places which 
are very diverse. Nevertheless harmony of deter- 
mination must first of all be preserved, and unity of 
work be sought. Both v/ill be easily obtained if 
everybody will consider the prescriptions of the 
Apostolic See as his law of life, and will obey the 
Bishops whom the '' the Holy Ghost has placed to 
rule the Church of God ". . . . Likewise that it 
it is not lawful to follow one rule in private life, an- 
other in public life, namely, so that the authority of 
the Church may be observed in private life, dis- 
regarded in public life.'' To the same effect, see the 
Encyclicals of June 20th, 1888, and Jan. loth, 1890. 

It is unnecessary to point out how the main prin- 
ciples of our Declaration of Independence and of the 
Bills of Rights, incorporated into our National, as 
well as our various State Constitutions, are directly 
negatived by the foregoing declarations, as emphat- 
ically as they were in the Syllabus of Errors of 
Pius IX.; see Hoffman's Sphere of the State. 

But popular government, free speech, etc., de- 
nounced in this Encyclical, are by no means the 
only claims of modern liberal states which are de- 



54 

clared null and void by the Infallible Papacy, since 
the very right to enact laws as a sovereign power, 
without the consent of the Church, is denied to the 
State. 

To prove this from the Encyclical denouncing 
Socialism and Communism, we cite only one sen- 
tence : '' But if the ordinances of legislators and 
princes sanction or command what is contrary to 
the divine or the natural law, then the dignity of 
the Christian name, our duty and the Apostolic 
precept, proclaim that we must obey God rather 
than man." This principle is elaborated in the En- 
cyclical of Jan. loth, 1890. 

How much is covered by the expression '^the 
divine law " is seen by turning again to the Ency- 
clical on the Christian Constitution of States : 
*^ Whatsoever, therefore, in human affairs is in any 
manner sacred ; whatsoever pertains to the salvation 
of souls, or the worship of God, whether it be so in 
its own nature, or o.i the other hand, is held to be 
so for the sake of the end to which it is referred — 
all this is in the power and subject to the free dis- 
position of the Church.'* 

This passage has been taken for their chief au- 
thority by the Bishops of Quebec on the Manitoba 
school question in their '' United Declaration '' 
(Catholic Review, June 13, 1896): 

" If the bishops, whose authority springs from God 
Himself, are the natural judges of a question which 
involves the Christian faith, religion and morality, 
if they are the recognized chiefs of a society, per- 
fect, sovereign, superior by its nature and by its end 



55 

to civil society, it belongs to them, when circum- 
stances demand, not only to express their views 
and desires in all matters of religion, but also to 
point out to the faithful, or to approve the proper 
means to arrive at the spiritual end which they pro- 
pose to reach. This doctrine is that of the great 
Pope Leo XIIL, in his encyclical Immortale Dei : — 
* All that which in human things is sacred by any 
title whatever, all that which touches the safety of 
souls and worship of God, either by its nature or 
by relation to its aim, all that is under the authority 
of the Church.' 

'' We must briefly recall these principles, inherent 
in the very constitution of the Church ; these es- 
sential rights of religious authority, in order to 
justify the attitude taken by the members of the 
hierarchy in the present school question and to make 
better understood the obligations of the faithful to 
follow episcopal directions. 

'^ Please remark, our dearly beloved brethren, that 
a Catholic is not permitted, let him be a journalist, 
elector, candidate or member, to have two lines of 
conduct in a religious point of view, one for private 
life and one for public life, and to trample under 
his feet in the exercise of duties not social the 
obligations imposed on him by his title of a sub- 
mitted son of the Church. Therefore all Catholics 
should only vote for candidates who will formally 
and solemnly engage themselves to vote in Parlia- 
ment in favor of the legislation giving to the Catho- 
lics of Manitoba the school laws which were rec- 
ognized to them by the Privy Council of England. 



56 

This grave duty imposes itself on all good Catholics, 
and you would not be justifiable either before your 
spiritual guides or before God Himself to set aside 
this obligation." 

Having thus seen how large a field is exempt from 
the authority of the State, on account of its falling 
within the province of the '^ divine law," let us 
next inquire what is embraced by the term '' natural 
law," which according to the Encyclical against 
Socialism, above cited, is equally out of the jurisdic- 
tion of the State. 

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the natural 
law embraces all human law as shovvni by the fol- 
lowing quotations : 

(Summa I., II., q. 91 a 3) : '' Besides the divine and 
natural law, there is a certain human law found by 
man, according to which those things v/hich are 
found in natural law are particularly ordered." 
(Summa I., II., q. 95 a 2) : '' W hether all human law is 
derived from natural law. ... I reply that 
one must say that, as Augustine says in I. de lib. arb. 
that that does not appear to be law which is un- 
just ; and as far as it has justice, so far it has the 
strength of law ; but in human matters a thing is 
said to be just because it agrees with a rule of rea- 
son. But the first rule of reason is the law of nature, 
as has been above shown ; hence all law humanl}^ en- 
acted has so much force as it is derived from the law 
of nature. If, therefore, in anything it disagrees 
with the law of nature, it will not be law, but a cor- 
ruption of law." 

(Summa I., II., q. 95 a 4) : '* It is first from the es- 



57 

sence of human law, that it is derived from the law 
of nature ; as appears from what has been said and 
according to this, positive law is divided into law of 
nations (jus gentium) ?md civil law (jus civile) accord- 
ing to the two modes by which anything is derived 
from the law of nature, as has been said above. For 
to the law of nations pertain those things which are 
derived from the law of nature, as conclusions from 
principles, as that purchases and sales must be just 
and other things of this kind, without which men 
could not live together, which is according to the 
law of nature since man is naturally a social animal, 
as is shown in the first book of (Aristotle's) Politics. 
Those things truly which are derived from the law 
of nature by means of a particular enactment, per- 
tain to the civil law, according to what any particu- 
lar State may determine to be suitable to itself." 

(Summa I., II., q. 96, a. 4) : '* Just human laws bind 
men's consciences, by reason of the divine law from 
which they are derived.'' 

(Summa I., 1L> q. 94, a. 3) : '' Since, according to St. 
Augustine in the temporal law, nothing is just or 
legitimate which has not gone forth from the divine 
law ; it is certain that all laws, so far as they partake 
of right reason, are derived from the divine law." 

From the foregoing citations it appears that human 
laws are a part of both the divine law and the law 
of nature, and more particularly of the latter ; but 
that they can effect, not the general principles of the 
law of nature which are necessary for the co-exist- 
ence of civilized men in states, but only the details 
developed in the practical application of those prin- 



58 

ciples. This divine or natural law, as a work of 
human reason, will hereafter be shown to be nothing 
but the will of the reigning Pope. In matters 
entirely independent of religion or the care of souls, 
there exists, therefore, for the Roman Catholic an 
unwritten constitutional law, regulating the most 
important principles of social life, which legislatures 
may not touch — and if they presume to do so, 
their statutes are against reason and therefore no 
laws. 

Aquinas was in this case again following in the foot- 
steps of ''the Philosopher," although Aristotle states 
the principle rather as an oratorical subterfuge 
(Rhet., I., 15, 1375, a. 27 seq.): '' When you have no 
case according to the law of the land, appeal to the 
laws of nature and quote the Antigone of Sophocles, 
' Argue that an unjust lavvr is no law, etc' " 

Little did ''the Philosopher " think what serious 
consequences this thoughtless advice was to have, in 
constituting in each individual a court of appeal 
against the laws of his own country. Thus the 
famous Jesuit Suraez says (De Legibus, III., c. 19): 
" Lex injusta non est lex." 

How utterly impossible it would be to carry on a 
government on this principle is shown for example 
in the chapter on " Toleration " in Ritchie's " Natural 
Rights." 

The whole relation of natural, human and divine 
law is summed up by the present Pontiff himself in 
his Encyclical De Libertate Humana, dated June 20, 
1888 (Leonis Papae XIII., AUocutiones, vol. III., 
p. 96): " Therefore it follows that the law of nature 



59 

is the same as the eternal law placed within rational 
beings, and inclining them to proper action and end. 
and it IS the same as the eternal reason of the creator 
and governor of the world, God. . . . What 
reason and the law of nature is for individual man, 
human law does the same for man associated for the 
common good (m states). ... If therefore any- 
thing is sanctioned by authority which differs from 
the principles of right reason, and may be pernicious 
to the state, it has no force of law, since it would not 
be a rule of justice and would lead men astray, for 
whose good society was formed." 

The whole Roman Catholic doctrine of law is set 
forth at length by Father Matteo Liberatore, S. J., a 
favorite writer in the Roman Civilta Cattolica, in his 
*' Principles of Political Economy '' (translated by 
Edward Herneage Bering, New York, Benziger & 
Co., 1891 ; p. 129): 

^' From this it by no means follows that the State 
may suppress private property, and make itself the 
proprietor of all the land, on the plea that such a 
step is conducive to the common good. The 
reason why this cannot justly be done, is that 
the right of property arises in us as an individual 
and domestic right, and therefore as substan- 
tially prior to civil society and independent of 
it ; and as the human person and the family are 
prior to civil society and independent of it. 
The vState has authority over the rights that 
come from itself. It has no authority over 
rights that come from nature — rights that preceded 
the State in history and in reason. . . . Hence 



6o 

no State is competent to decide about that utility ; 
and therefore private property cannot be abolished 
by any political legislation, even if all the States in 
the world, as States, agreed together to do so. Only 
by the Divine Legislator could it be abolished, or 
by the spontaneous renouncement of it by all men, 
taken one by one. If such abolition were forcibly 
imposed by the State it would be a tyrannical viola- 
tion of man's rights, and must as such meet with the 
reprobation of the Church. ... In questions of 
right we must diligently guard against attributing 
too much power to the State. There are three 
things with respect to man that are of immediate Di- 
vine institution, and therefore have laws independ- 
ent of the State. These are individual personality, 
the family and the universal society of all men 
under the direct but invisible government of God. 
. . . And indeed if the right to have property 
is a dictate of reason, it may well be said to be a^dic- 
tate of nature ; for man's reason flows from his 
essence, inasmuch as the essence of man is that of a 
rational animal." 

It may be here remarked that the difficulty in 
drawing conclusions as to the details of this so-called 
law of nature, is shown for instance in this case of 
private property as to which Liberatore asserts so 
positively that it antedates the State ; the most recent 
researches, such as those of Charles Letourneau, as 
set forth in his '' Property ; its Origin and Develop- 
ment," show that tribal ownership, i, e,, a species 
of communism, precedes individual ownership, as 
marriage to a whole clan preceded monogamy. 



6i 

No book among the English Roman Catholics 
stands higher than Father Rickaby's ^^ Moral 
Philosophy or Ethics and Natural Law," one of the 
very able Stonyhurst Series of Catholic Philosophy ; 
he says, on page 149 : '' No power in heaven above, 
or on earth beneath, can dispense from any portion of 

the natural law (Page 299.) Lastly it is 

not true that all rights, notably rights of property, 
are the creation of the State. A man is a man first 
and a citizen afterwards. As a man he has certain 
rights actual and political ; these the State exists, 
not to create for they are prior to it in the order of 
nature, but to determine them when indeterminate, 
to sanction and to safeguard them. Natural rights 
go before legal rights and are presupposed to them, 
as the law of nature before that law which is civil 
and positive. It is an ' idol of the tribe ' of lawyers 
to ignore all lav/ but that upon w^hich their own pro- 
fessional action takes its stand.'* 

Among German Roman Catholic writers, we would 
cite as undoubted authority Dr. Plassman's '' Die 
Moral," p. 38 : '* Since the constitution of society is 
framed to suit moral purposes, it follows that the 
science of morals is above the science of law. In re- 
gard to law, we must distinguish positive law, the 
law of nature and the eternal law (lex positiva, 
naturalis and aeterna). The positive law must be 
founded on the law of nature and this in turn on the 
eternal law. ... (p. 44.) Although positive law 
can and may be justified only as a part of the lex 
naturalis et asterna, the chief difference is diametrical, 
namely : quae juris naturae sunt, ideo sunt praecepta 



C2 

quia bona, ideo prohibita quia mala ; quae vero juris 
positivi, ideo bona, quia prasecepta, ideo mala, quia 
prohibita. . . . The object of this paragraph is 
only to show why the whole science of morals can be 
treated as the summa juris naturalis." 

If w^e consult American writers, we find the same 
theories in the Latin work ''De Philosophia Morali," 
by Father Russo (dedicated to Archbishop Corrigan 
with the ''imprimatur" of Father Preston, his Vicar 
General) (p. 60) : '' Hence you see that positive law 

derives its validit}^ from natural law Natural 

law on the contrar}' is shown by a certain natural 

medium which is the li2;ht of reason Hence 

natural law is the eternal law as participated in by a 
rational creature.'' Cardinal Satolli in his '' Loyalty 
to Church and State " (p. 226) says : '' Now in regard 
to our youths, there are three rights which have 
claims on them, viz., the right of nature, the right of 
the nation, and the right of God ; that is, for domes- 
tic society under the rule of parents, for civil society 
under the rule of due authority, and for the Church 
of Christ under the sway of Divine authority. This 
last is of all societies the greatest by extent, dignity 
and faith." 

In France, Cardinal Gousset, in his '' Exposition des 
Principes du Droit Canonique " declares, on p. 14: 
''AH who occupy themselves in theory or in practice 
with questions of public or private law are in contact 
with the divine and canon law and should have a 
knowledge more or less exact of the laws of the 
Church. In Christian societies, one has always re- 
garded the principles of the ecclesiastical law as the 



63 

basis of civil law, public and private The 

canon law, jus canonicum, is called also the divine 
law, jus sacrum, the ecclesiastical law, jus ecclesias- 
ticum ; the pontifical law, jus pontificium. This last 
designation is not less exact than the first three ; be- 
sides what it has in common with them to distinguish 
the ecclesiastical law from the civil law, which is the 
Caesarian law, jus Csesareum, it also perfectly ex- 
plains the origin and principal cause, in indicating 
that the canon law emanates principally from the 
Sovereign Pontiff, or that an ecclesiastical law has 
no force except so far as it comes from the Pope or 
is conformed to the spirit of a law sanctioned more 
or less expressly by the Pope." 

The object of citing these works of leading Roman 
Catholic authorities in various countries is to show 
the unanimity with which they adhere to the theory 
of Thomas Aquinas, and that this relation of civil and 
ecclesiastical law must be regarded as that enunciated 
authoritatively by the Church. The entire civil law 
as embraced within the natural and divine law must, 
therefore, be understood to be claimed by Leo XIII., 
in passages above cited from the Encyclical denounc- 
ing Socialism, and the Encyclical on the Christian 
Constitution of States, as being '^in the power and 
subject to the free disposition of the Church.*' The 
theory of the Roman Emporers, that " quod placet 
principi habet legum vigorem '' has therefore been 
adopted by the present would-be Ruler ^f the World. 

For the world in general, this principle is explicitly 
announced in the Encyclical Dc Libertate Humana 
(above cited) : '' Besides, It is a most true duly lo 



64 

venerate authority and to be subject obediently to 
just laws. . . . But where the right to command 
is wanting, or if anything is enjoined which is con- 
trary to reason, the eternal law or the rule of God, 
it is right not to obey men, in order that God may 
be obeyed." 

To the same effect is the Encyclical of January lo, 
1890, beginning with the word '' Sapientiae " (above 
cited) : " Truly, if the lav/s openly differ from the 
divine law, if they injure the church, or those things 
which concern religion, or the authority of Jesus 
Christ in the Supreme Pontiff, then truly it is a duty 
to resist, a crime to obey/' 

In the Encyclical of Leo XIII. to all the Bishops 
of the Catholic world concerning civil government, 
dated June 20, 1881 (Leonis Papae XIIL, AUocu- 
tiones, vol. I., p. 210), this teaching is repeated: 
^' There is one cause for which men should not obey, 
if anything is demanded from them w^hich openly is 
opposed to natural or divine law : for all things, in 
which the law of nature or of God is violated, it is 
equally wrong to command and to do ... . nor 
does their (rulers') authority then prevail, which 
where there is not justice, does not exist.'' 

The following extract from '' The Catholic Review" 
of February 29, 1896, shows how these principles are 
to be applied in practical politics : 

*' The Reverend Peter Finley, S. J., delivered an 
address on ' The Church and Civil Society ' at the 
Catholic Club in Dublin a few days ago. He summed 
up his conclusions in these memorable words : ' First, 
The object which the Church and her rulers must 



65 

ever have in view is the object which Christ lived 
and died for — a spiritual one, the salvation of men's 
souls. Second, There are many matters wholly 
spiritual — interpretation of Scripture, mysteries of 
religion, Sacraments, and the like — and these lie 
evidently within the Church's jurisdiction. Third, 
There may be others which have no spiritual side, 
no bearing upon faith and morals, and if there be 
they are no wise subject to the Church's authority. 
Fourth, But there is a vast multitude of human ac- 
tions, which go to constitute the life of civil society, 
in themselves unspiritual, without any direct and 
immediate bearing on the salvation of the soul — edu- 
cation, poor law administration, care of the sick and 
dying, reformation of the criminal, Parliamentary 
legislation, exercise of the poor law, the municipal, 
the Parliamentary franchise, and a thousand others 
— which yet may affect spiritual interests, produce 
consequences most hurtful or most helpful to souls, 
and so become indirectly spiritual, and subject to 
the jurisdiction of the Church. Fifth, And whether 
any given action is of this nature, an object of con- 
scientious obligation, and so subject to interference 
on the part ot Church authority, can only be deter- 
mined by the Church herself — by the Supreme 
Pontiff, or by a General Council with supreme 
authority, and, therefore, without appeal ; by each 
Catholic Bishop m his own diocese, with an authority 
which cannot be set aside by the State or by the 
faithful, though it may be appealed against to the 
religious authority which is supreme.' " 

It will be noted that the last foregoing citation 



66 

from Cardinal SatoUi, while it expressly mentions the 
rule of parents for the Family and the Divine author- 
ity for the Church, specifies concerning the State 
only that it is to be under '' due authorit)^" 

In view of such passages are even the most 
passionate declarations of so-called liberal Roman 
Catholics entirely reassuring ? Take for example 
the following declaration of the most patriotic of the 
Hierarchy, Archbishop Ireland, which was recently 
read in the United States Senate, as a complete proof 
of the loyalty of Roman Catholics : '' The Church 
recognizes as her own sphere faith and morals ; she 
possesses and claims no mission in civil and political 
matter. If the Church encroaches upon the sphere 
of the State, we should bid her away. If the State 
enter into the sanctuary of conscience, the proper 
empire of the Church, the appeal is to God, and the 
State is ordered to hold off its hands. Separation of 
Church and State revolving freely in their separate 
and distinct spheres — Catholics fall behind none of 
their fellow-citizens in admiring it and demanding 
its continuance." 

What are the limits of ** the sanctuary of con. 
science, the empire of the Church '? Has Father 
Finley spoken the truth, in the last foregoing quota- 
tion, in saying that the Church is to define its own 
limits in all matters relating to '' education, poor law 
administration, care of the sick and dying, reforma- 
tion of the criminal. Parliamentary legislation, exer- 
cise of the poor law, the municipal, the Parliament- 
ary franchise and a thousand others " ? If so, where 
does Archbishop Ireland's loyalty begin ? What 



67 

rights does he assign to the Church and what to the 
State ? 

The following quotation from the Catholic Review 
shows how in France, corporations may refuse to pay 
taxes on the same plea of conscience : 

'' The French government has passed a law taxing 
religious orders. Monsignor Tirgero, Bishop of 
Seez, has addressed an energetic protest to M. 
Ribot, the Premier. Allow me, Monsieur le Min- 
istrCj to explain to you the embarrassing position in 
which I am placed by your law. Ought I to advise 
the religious communities in my diocese to offer 
resistance or to be submissive ? If I advise resist- 
ance, it will be said that I have no respect for the 
law. If I counsel submission, my indignant con- 
science will cry : ' Anathema ! to the prevaricator 
of justice, to the contemner of his duty.' You can- 
not but be aware that the law of the empire ends where 
that of the conscience commences'' 

Are Protestants also to be allowed to set up the 
claim for ^'the sanctuary of conscience "? 

The following article from " Church Progress " on 
the grievances of Protestants in Peru, Bolivia and 
Ecuador, where their public worship is restricted, 
their marriages not recognized, &c., speaks for itself : 

** The only real disability under which Protestant- 
ism labors in these countries is that it is not a legal- 
ized form of religion, and of this it has not the 
slightest right to complain. It forgets that it is an 
impudent intruder amongst a Catholic population in 
possession of the entire deposit of faith, that it is a 
religious system, both in method and in doctrine, 



68 

odious and repugnant to the people of those coun- 
tries, an insult to their intelligence and their hearts, 
propagated as it is, as a reform of their own faith, 
which the preachers revile with contempt and cal- 
umny. It has not the slightest justification for its 
presence here, and yet is accorded every toleration 
except actual legalization as a religion by law estab- 
lished." 

In fact, no Roman Catholic ought to appeal for 
anything on the plea of conscience, for, as will be 
shown in the chapter on the Church and the Indi- 
vidual, conscience is for them no independent God- 
given guide, but only a sub-department of man*s 
reason, guided by the Pope. The only correct posi- 
tion for them is that of Father Rickeby, S. J., in his 
'' Moral Philosophy ": '' But if the State is sincerely 
convinced that the convictions openly professed and 
propagated by some of its subjects are subversive of 
social order and public morality, whose sincere con- 
viction is it that must carry the day in practice ? It 
is of the essence of government that the convictions, 
sincere or otherwise, of the governed shall on certain 
practical issues be waived in external observance in 
favor of the convictions of the ruling power. After 
all, this talk of conscience and sincere convictions is 
but the canting phrase of the day, according to 
which conscience means mere wild humor and 
headstrong self-will " (page 368). To the same effect 
is the Encyclical on Human Liberty and the Letter 
to the Emperor of Brazil by Leo XIII. 

These full-blown Roman Catholic doctrines are 
taught also in the text-books used in our American 



69 

schools and colleges, although the Latin language is 
expected to keep them somewhat from profane eyes. 
The whole subject is summed up by the '' Elementa 
Philosophiae Moralis " (Benziger Brothers, New 
York, 1886), of Father Jouin, S. J., Professor at St. 
John's College, Fordham, New York (p. 371): '' The 
Church is a visible society . ... it is independ- 
ent from the political society ; because she was in- 
stituted by God himself, from whom she received 
proper authority to order all things which pertain 
to the object of this society beside those laws which 
were given by God himself, and because her object 
is not only distinct from that of civil society, but far 
excells it. For this (civil society) looks only to the 
external temporary order; but that (the Church) 
looks to the ultimate object. And all things should 
be subject to the ultimate object. Therefore, the 
object of civil society is subordinate to that of the 
Church and not conversely. Therefore it is impos- 
sible that the religious society or Church should 

depend on civil society Wherefore civil 

authority cannot decree anything which is contrary 
to the doctrines of the Church, and it ought to 
watch over and protect the rights of the Church and 
its members, and if anything is defined as evil by the 
Church, that also it should hold as such and so far 

as possible proscribe For the Church 

is independent of civil authority, because the civil 
authority did not receive the duty of directing the 
minds and wills of men to their ultimate end, and 
itself (the civil authority) is subject to the authority 
of the Church in all things which concern the object 



JO 

of the Church. Therefore the civil authority has no 
right to oppose itself to legislation of the Church. . 

'' The Church was instituted by God that she should 
be the infallible teacher of truth in those matters 
which concern faith and morals, because she must 
direct the minds and wills to their ultimate object. 
Therefore she must with authority teach those things 
which are to be believed and done that eternal life 
may be obtained. Therefore she ought not only to 
propose truth, but also to prevent, so far as possible, 
that the faithful should not be led into error in matters 

of faith and morals The Church is a 

spiritual society from its object, but it is composed 
not of spirits but of men ; hence external punishments 
are necessary. It is not necessary that this punish- 
ment should be imprisonment, because there are also 
other external punishments which can be applied. 
But in itself it is not repugnant that the Church 
should be able to decree such punishment. The 
political power can punish external crimes; but it is 
absurd to oblige the Church always to recur to this 
power, because in that way it would make her in a 
certain way dependent on the civil power. As to 
the question, whether the Church has the right to 
condemn any one to death, one can reply that the 
Church as a religious society has never exercised 
this power, but always has been opposed to inflicting 

the death penalty But many approved 

authors also assert that the Church has the power of 
inflicting even the death penalty.*' 

Is not the teaching of such doctrine within the 
State of New York a justification in certain cases of 



71 

what our Penal Code declares to be false imprison- 
ment and murder? No dependence of these doc- 
trines on recognition of such ecclesiastical power by 
the State appears in this text-book. It follows, 
therefore, that the teaching of Father Liberatore in 
his Chiesa e Stato (p. yy) applies, that wherever the 
State has apostacized " there arises in society a neces- 
sary disorder, namely, the existence of a legitimate 
power, which is independent of the public deposi- 
tory of force/' 

Must not the fruit of such teaching be treason ? 

The source of this natural law is indicated in the 
Encyclical on Human Liberty as follows : '' Reason 
certainly prescribes to the will what to seek and 
what to avoid. This decree of reason is called law. 
. . . Such is the beginning of all natural law, 
which is written and engraved in the minds of all 
individual men, for it is 'human reason itself which 
commands to do right and forbids to do wrong.*' 

As Aquinas says in Summa, I., II., q. 95, a. 2, '' the 
first rule of reason is the law of nature.*' This state- 
ment will be found repeated again and again, down to 
the Encyclical of Leo XIII. on the Condition of Labor 
(above cited) : '' For laws only bind when they are 
in accordance with right reason." 

If law is then a work of human reason it is a 
human act and therefore it follows according to St. 
Thomas Aquinas, as shown by the following quota- 
tions, that it is a moral act (Summa, I., II., q. i, a. 3), 
'' Moral acts and human acts are the same." 

" There begins the rule of morals, where first the 
rule of the will begins " (in 2 D., 24, q. 3, a. 2). 



72 

'* Our acts are to be called moral, so far as they 
proceed from reason and are free'' (Q. 2 de Malo, 
a6 ft passim). In the first seventeen questions ot his 
Summa, I., II., he treats of physical acts of man and 
in the remainder of that work he sets out his moral 
acts which arc all those of which ^^ood or bad can be 
predicated (Summa, I., II., q. 19, a. i ad 3 and i(/. q. 18, 
a. 5), — or of which it can be said that they are guided 
by reason. Thus St. Thomas says in his Proem. 
Ethic. : '' Morality is the order which reason makes in 
human acts by ordering them in accordance with the 
rules of morals;" see Byrne's Catholic Doctrine of 
Faith and Morals (p. S4), 

Moreover in his definition of moral philosophy he 
includes all intentional human acts, whether they are 
done by men as individuals or as members of an 
economic group or members of the State ; see Comm. 
in lib. Ethic. Arist., lect. t. i. i. : '' Et inde est, quod 
moralis philosophia in tres partes dividatur. Quarum 
prima considerat operationes unius hominis ordi- 
nates ad finem, qaa3 vocatur monastica. Secunda 
autem considerat operationes multitudinis domes- 
ticDe, quas vocatur oeconomica. Tertia autem con- 
siderat operationes multitudinis civilis quae vocatur 
politica." All of the modern leading Roman 
Catholic writers on morals adopt the same broad 
definition. Thus Dr. Plassman says in his work 
on " Morals " (page 29) : '* The definition of the 
formal object (of the science of morals) is a human 
action, done intentionally with knowledge of its 
consequences." And in a passage above cited he 
says : '' The whole science of morals can be treated 



73 

as the summa juris naturalist Father Rickaby says 
in his '' Moral Philosophy " Tp. 2; : '•' Mora! philos- 
ophy is divided into ethics and natural law/' 

Father Russo, in the introduction to his '' Moral 
Philosophy," above cited, defines moral philosophy 
as ** a practical science derived from the principles 
of reason, directing- human acts to honesty/' 

Bearing then in mind that every human act, 
guided by reason, is a moral ac'r,, let us now turn to 
the decree of the last Vatican Council, where we 
find it to be declared that the Pope is infallible in all 
matters relating to faith or morals f'^de fide vel 
moribus "; ; as set out in Life of Cardinal Manning 
(vol. II. p. 450), the text is as follows : '' Romanum 
Pontificem, cum ex cathedra loquitur. . . doctrinam 
de fide vel moribus cih universa ecclesia tenendam 
definit ; per assistentiam divinam, ipsi in beato Petro 
promissam, ea infallibilitate pollere qua divinus 
Redemptor ecclesian suam in definienda doctrina de 
fide vel moribus instructam esse volent/' 

The conclusion seems, therefore, inevitable that 
according to Roman Catholic theory, the Pope 
is not only the source of all law and has power to 
dispense with any law, but can direct every human 
intentional or rational act, including, of course, the 
casting of a ballot. 

As the Pope can therefore direct every act of 
reason, he controls the source of natural law which, 
as we have seen, is above civil law. 

Thus Leo XIII. himself declares in his Encyclical 
concerning the principal duties of Christian citizens, 
dated January 10, i8qo (Leonis Papae XI II. Alloca- 
tiones, Vol. IV., p. 15): '' As the concord of minds 



74 

requires perfect consent in matters of faith, so it also 
demands wills perfectly subject and obedient to the 
Church and to the Roman Pontiff as to God. . . , 
But this must also be placed among the duties of 
Christians (besides a belief in all the dogmas of the 
faith) that they allow themselves to be ruled and 
governed by the power and authority of the Bishops 
and especially of the Apostolic Seat " (Rome). 

For practical applications of this teaching, one has 
not far to seek. 

The '' New World " (cited in the Catholic Review), 
speaks more plainly : '' We hold that, where a Cath- 
olic is nominated for an^important public office, if he 
be in every respect as well qualified for that office as 
his opponent. Catholics are justified in takmg into 
account the fact of his being a Catholic in deciding 
how they will vote." 

As Cardinal Logue, the Primate of all Ireland, 
words it in his letter to the Irish Bishops ('' Catholic 
Review/' July 13, 1895): '' A control (over educa- 
tion) which the Church has not from any department 
of the State nor from the delegation of the people, but 
from her divine right to teach and safeguard the 
faith and morals of all her members, especially the 
young.'' 

The negative proposition also foDows, as the 
^' Catholic Review " states in an editorial of Novem- 
ber 24, 1895 : '' They (the opponents of State aid to 
Roman Catholic schools) have no right to make the 
State the supreme arbiter in morals." 

It would seem, therefore, that all the powers of 
the State are enjoyed on sufferance of the Church . 



75 

for their relation — to repeat the comparison of Leo 
XIII. and Thomas Aquinas — is that of dependence, 
i, e,y as the body depends on the soul. 

P. Matteo Liberatore, in his Chiesa e Stato (above 
cited), says : '' The State must understand itself to 
be a subordinate sovereignty exercising ministerial 
functions under a superior sovereignty and govern- 
ing the people conformably to the will of that lord 
to whom it is subject.'* In his Encyclical concerning 
the duties of citizens, dated January lo, 1890, Lea 
XIII. says: ^' The same (the Church) is not only a 
perfect society, but even superior to any human 
society." A similar declaration is in the Encyclical 
on Marriage and Divorce. 

What were the authorities of St. Thomas Aquinas 
for this theory of the relation of Church and State ? 
In the passage from De Regimine Principum above 
cited (Lib. III., Chapter X.), St. Thomas mentions 
the two principal authorities for his opinions on the 
relation of Church and State, namely, the Philo- 
sopher, Aristotle, from whom he derived his philo- 
sophical theory, and the writings of the Supreme 
Pontiffs and of the Emperors, from which he derived 
his historical facts. Among the latter were included 
the forged Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, in which 
he implicitly believed, although no Roman Catholic 
writer of this century ventures to defend their au- 
thenticity ; see Pope and Council by Janus. In the 
next sentence (Lib. III., Chap. X. of De Regimine 
Principum), in the extract above given, he cites the 
cession of Constantine to Sylvester, which fiction 
was a part of this most gigantic swindle ; and in his 



book against the Greek Church, he relies completely 
on the forged passages from Cyril, to sustain his 
argument for the sovereignty of the Pope. No one 
would cite these writings as authorities to-day and 
yet the Infallible Head of the Roman Catholic 
Church utters no word of warning when recommend- 
ing the Angel of the Schools with such elaborate 
praise, as the Patron of all institutions of learning. 

If we consider the source of his political theories, 
is that entitled to any greater respect ? Aristotle was 
the tutor and pensioner of Alexander the Great, who 
was the destroyer of Greek republics and the first uni- 
versal monarch ; '' the Philosopher " was filled with 
contempt for the democracy of Athens, which natur- 
ally returned the feeling, and on the death of Alexan- 
der, he had to flee from that city. How great was 
his contempt for the masses, may be seen by the fol- 
lowing two quotations (Politics, III., 5, 5) : '' For no 
man can practice virtue who is living the life of a 
mechanic;" (/^.,VI., 4, 12): ^^ There is no room for 
moral excellence in any of their employments 
whether they be mechanics or traders or laborers.'' 
In his Politics, he has given us a picture of the ab- 
solute sovereignty of a Greek city, in which every- 
thing that we consider individual liberty is sacrificed 
to the Government ; he intimates, however, that an 
absolute monarchy was his actual ideal, and evidently 
expected this from Alexander. His theories more- 
over were intended only for the small city-states of 
his day, as he expressly says (Politics, VII., 6) that 
no state should have more than 100,000 inhabitants. 

Aquinas entertained the same opinion, as appears 



17 

from his De Regimine Principum, where he com- 
pares the relation of a ruler to his people to that of 
a captain to his crew (Lib. I., Cap. XIV.), and in his 
'' Contra Gentiles " (Lib. IV., Cap. LXXVL), where 
he expresses himself as follows : ^^ But the best gov- 
ernment of a multitude is that it be governed by 
one ; this appears from the end of government, 
which is peace ; for peace and the unity of the sub- 
jects is the aim of a ruler ; but one is more likely to 
produce unity than many. It is manifest, therefore, 
that the government of the Church has been so ar- 
ranged that one presides over the whole Church.'* 
The same idea remained in the Church and in mod- 
ern times is voiced by Joseph de Maistre in his '' Du 
Pape " (p. i6) : '* It is the same with the Church : in 
one way or the other it must be governed like every 
other association, otherwise there would be no ag- 
gregation, no assembly, no unity. That government 
is then in its nature infallible, that is absolute ; other- 
wise it would no longer govern . . . (p. i66). No 
sovereign, without a nation, as no nation without a 
sovereign.'' 

The Encyclical of Leo XIII. on Church Unity, an 
abstract of which, made by Cardinal Gibbons, is pub- 
lished in the daily press of June 30, 1896, is substan- 
tially a repetition of this idea : 

"As no true and perfect human society can be 
conceived which is not governed by some supreme 
authority, so Christ of necessity gave to His Church 
a supreme authority to which all Christians must be 
obedient. For the preservation of unity there must 
be unity of government jure divino^ and men may be 



7S 

placed outside the one fold by schism as well as by 
lieresy." 

This argument in favor of the Papacy would be 
conclusive if all societies must be absolute mon- 
archies : to us, livinsr for over a centurv in a federal 
republic, without king or emperor, this argument has 
no force. A cursory glance at the writings of Ante- 
Niceae Fathers shows that the early Church was or- 
ganized not as an absolute monarchy, but as a group 
of federal States. As Canon Gore well states in his 
Roman Catholic Claims (p. 124) : " The original idea 
of the Episcopate would have secured for the Church 
a duly representative government, and would have 
provided, by the confederation of relatively in- 
dependent churches, a system of checks upon one- 
sided local tendencies. The Papacy represents the 
triumph of imperial absolutism over representative, 
constitutional authority, and of centralization over 
consentient witness and cooperation." For us re- 
publicans, vrho do not believe that the rule of one is 
the best, but that a representative, constitutional 
government is to be preferred, does it not follow, ac- 
cording to the reasoning of St. Thomas, last above 
cited, that God must have intended His Church to 
have a representative, constitutional government, in- 
stead of an absolute monarchv ? 

Aristotle also believed in the division of citizens 
into castes (*' Politics.'' Book 7, Ch. 9), which idea 
was probably derived from Egyptian precedent, and 
among republics he considered the aristocratic Lace- 
d^mon to be the model. Thomas Aquinas, in his 
Summa. I.. II., q. 95, a. 4, refers to the different laws 



79 

applicable to various classes, as to priests who pray 
for the people and to warriors who fight for the 
people. 

Froude's Council of Trent gives a correct picture 
of the result of these teachings : (p. 8.) '' There is a 
maxim now that every one is equal before the law. 
From the twelfth to the sixteenth century the 
clergy were a separate caste. They made and ad- 
ministered their own laws. They could neither 
sue or be sued in any secular court. 

(p. II.) *^ But if the clergy were exempt from lay 
jurisdiction, the laity were not exempt from the 
jurisdiction of the clergy. The lavv^ of the land 
might deal with common rights and obligations de- 
finable by statute or precedent. The clergy as the 
spiritual fathers of the people, were the guardians 
of morality. They had courts of their own, con- 
ducted upon their own principles, before which 

clergy and laity were alike bound to appear 

Morality was a word of widest latitude The 

spiritual law extended to sins, and not to notori- 
ous moral offenses only, but to everything which 
could be construed into sin by the Churches inter- 
pretation. 

(p. 4.) " The original reformation was a revolt of the 
laity against the clergy, a revolt against a compli- 
cated and all-embracing practical tyranny, the most 
intolerable that the world has ever seen. It was 
embraced on an assumption, no longer seriously held 
even by Catholics themselves, that the Church was 
the source of all authority, secular as well as 
spiritual. 



8o 

(p. 174.) '' The laity of Germany, the laity of Eng- 
land, had risen against ecclesiastical supremacy in 
all its forms. The Church's doctrines had only been 
offensive so far as they symbolized the usurpation of 
an overbearing and self-indulgent hierarchy." 

In '' Kirche und Kirchen," written by Dr. Bollin- 
ger while still a Roman Catholic, Ave see how the 
Church continued to assert its claims for the priest- 
hood as a privileged caste in the Papal States 
even into this century, so far as it had the power 
so to do. 

(p. 534.) ''As the priests constituted a class with 
privileges such as could exist in no other country of 
the world, the two classes were divided by a wide 
and deep gulf, and the laity was filled with a jealousy 
against the priesthood, which often went over into 

decided hate (p. 580.) The clergy had its 

privileged court, so that when a priest and a layman 
were both guilty of the same crime, they were tried 
before different courts. But also the penalties were 
different. Priests had the privilege of lighter pun- 
ishments.** 

(p. 612.) "All higher offices are filled by priests, and 
laymen cannot fill them (p. 614.) The de- 
mand is, therefore, not the exclusion of priests from 
holding public office, but the termination of a rule 
of caste, the introduction of the principle of equality 
in civil affairs, the participation of the people in its 
own government (p. 615.) The dissatisfac- 
tion is caused by the great inequality of social posi- 
tion which makes the priests always the rulers, and 
the laymen always the servants, which in every pub- 



8i 

lie or private contest between layman and priest all 
the advantages are in the hands of the latter and 
makes the defeat of the former almost certain/' 

How wide the gulf between the Roman Catholic 
clergy and laity still is, even in England, is shown 
by a letter of Mgr. Talbot, in the Life of Cardinal 
Manning (Vol. II., P. 318) : 

'' They (the laity) are now beginning to show the 
cloven foot, which I have seen the existence of for 
a long time. They are only putting into practice 
the doctrine taught by Dr. Newman in his '' Ram- 
bler/' . . . What is the province of the laity ? 
To hunt, to shoot, to entertain. These matters they 
understand ; but to meddle with ecclesiastical mat- 
ters they have no right at all." 

Cardinal Manning lamented that this spirit still 
existed even in England (Cardinal Manning's Life, 
p. 783) : '' I have often said that our priests are al- 
ways booted and spurred like cavalry officers in 
time of peace." 

This castelike division of classes Ignatius Loyola 
had done his part to complete, by supplying the 
highest priestly or ruling class. How strictly he 
bound his order to follow Thomas on every point, 
we have heard in the Encyclical above cited, and 
his pupil, Leo XIII., has shown us. The absolute 
subj 3Ction in the Jesuit order of the individual to 
the whole, is therefore a result of the same theories 
which produced in Greece the blind obedience of the 
Lacedsemonians to their laws, with its total eradica- 
tion of the spirit of individualism and progress. 

How strongly Leo XIII. believes in this castelike 



82 

division is shown by the epistle concerning the obedi- 
ence due by laymen to bishops, dated December 17, 
1888 (Leonis Papae XIIL, p. 183): '^ It is plain that 
there are in the Church two orders of men, one dis- 
tinct by nature from the other, shepherds and flock, 
that is, rulers and masses. The duty of the first 
order is to teach, to govern, to moderate the discipline 
of life, to give precepts ; the duty of the other is to 
be subject, to obey, to follow precepts, to give honor.'* 

The express recognition of the principle of relig- 
ious persecution is, moreover, an echo of the old 
Greek city constitution, which could not allow 
within its narrow borders any who did not recog- 
nize the city's gods ; not to swear by them was the 
sign of a traitor. Rome was in theory never any- 
thing more than a magnified city-state and when 
the cloak of the Cassars fell on the shoulders of the 
Pontifex Maximus rather than on those of the Ger- 
man rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, the refusal 
of heretics to recognize the Pope was punished in 
much of the same spirit as the refusal of early 
Christians to offer incense to the Roman Emperors ; 
Torquemada was acting for the successor of Diocle- 
tian. Christianity has, therefore, in this, as in so 
many other points, been forced to bear the blame 
for acts which were the consequences of following 
too closely the teachings of the ancient heathen 
civilizations, instead of those of the Gospel. 

No greater contrast than that between our Ger- 
manic Federal Constitv':ion, as outlined in the 
'* Federalist," with its resoect for the individual and 
its limited organizations for the government of local, 



83 

state and national affairs, and the inorganic, abso- 
lute government of a Greek city can be imagined ; 
see the author's '' Trade Organizations in Politics 
or Federalism in Cities/' The '' Ancien Regime *' 
of France, which was overthrown by the Revolu- 
tion, based its pretensions on the theories of Aristotle 
and Aquinas. ^^ L'etat, c'est moi"of Louis XIV. is 
of the same ancestry as '' L'eglise, c'est moi/* or 
rather '' La monde, c'est moi " of Leo XIIL 

As the Most Reverend Dr. Sheehan, Bishop of 
Waterford, at the Mayj-ooth Centenary declared, /yy 
in the presence of the whole English and Irish 
hierarchy (Catholic Review of July 20, 1895) : '' For 
us and for all Catholics he (Leo XIIL) is the vicar 
of Christ, the divinely appointed Head of the 
Church and t/ie leader and ruler of nations^ The 
echo of the cry urbi et orbi for universal dominion 
has not yet died out among the Seven Hills. 

But right or wrong in theory, have we Americans 
not had enough of sovereignties within our federal 
constitution that we should now accept a sover- 
eignty (for that is what Leo XIII.'s '' perfect society'* 
under the Sovereign Pontiff amounts to) above our 
Constitution ? How can we reconcile such theories 
with our principle of the separation of State and 
Church, which leaves to the latter to insure obedi- 
ence to its commands only appeals to the love of 
God and man, residing in each of us, as set out for 
example in Seabury's '' Introduction to the Study of 
Ecclesiastical Polity " ? How are such theories com- 
patible with a government '* of the people, by tlic 
people, for the people " ? 



o4 

The Rt. Rev. Abbott Snow, O. S. B., recognizes 
the incompatibility frankly in '' The Catholic 
Times" of August lo, 1894: ''AH authority and 
power (it is said) must be derived from the people, 
be exercised in their name, and be terminable at 
their will. In such a state what place is there for 
ecclesiastical authority ? Religion supposes an au- 
thority derived from God to regulate a system for 
the worship of God. The Catholic Church has a 
hierarchy of officials — Pope, Bishops and Clergy — 
with authority to commard the obedience of the 
people independent of the State. These officials 
cannot rule at the will of the State nor can their 
authority be derived from it." As Justin McCarthy 
says in his Leo XIII. (p. 85): ''The empire of the 
Pope is not merely greater than any other empire. 
It folds in all the empires and all the monarchies and 
all the republics in the world." 

The negative declarations of the Syllabus, which 
caused so much alarm to Mr. Gladstone, have been 
developed and put into the form of positive, univer- 
sal commands by Leo XIII.; he has completed the 
scheme which Aquinas planned and of which Loyola 
commenced the execution ; its aim is in the dominion 
of the world under a caste of priests ruled by a 
supreme Pontiff. In short, the Roman Catholic 
Church has been Jesuitized and now it would 
Jesuitize the world, through this apt pupil of the 
Jesuits, Leo XIII. Nippold's Kirchengeschichte 
(second volume) shows how the study of St. Thomas 
has always preceded ultra-montanism and a Jesuit 
invasion. 



85 

But even if we succeed in resisting the active 
assertion of the Papal claims as to the respective 
domains of Church and State, is not the very idea of 
the complete separation of the religious fromx the 
national life of a people, negatively, a mistake ? Kidd, 
in his Social Evolution, has shown that the real prin- 
ciple of life in a nation is its religion ; it is this super- 
natural sanction which makes men ready to sacrifice 
their selfish individual instinct for the good of the 
whole, for the benefit of generations yet unborn. 
He says (p. in): ''A religion is a form of belief 
providing an ultra-rational sanction for that large 
class of conduct in the individual where his interests 
and the interest of the social organism are antag- 
onistic, and by v/hich the former are rendered subor- 
dinate to the latter in the general interests of the 
evolution which the race is undergoing." 

The nations with national religions like Russia and 
England have certainly in this century taken a 
decided lead in progress of every kind before Roman 
Catholic countries, like France and Austria. Is not 
a certain connection between the nation and a 
national church desirable and theoretically cor- 
rect, so that the idea of an in ernational church 
organization is in itself to be rejected ? If all the 
men of a certain race have once become convinced 
sincerely of the truth of Christianity, and become 
enlightened by the gift of God's Holy Spirit speak- 
ing to their consciences, why should they not meet 
to consult and determine what is best for the spirit- 
ual welfare of all the race and in what form they can 
best worship their Creator? As Westcott says in 



86 

his *' Social Aspects of Christianity " (p. ^6) : "- A 
national church alone can consecrate the whole life 
of a people." 

If the theory advanced in the fourth chapter of 
this book is correct, that the Holy Spirit was prom- 
ised not only to the priesthood, but to all laymen 
who would avail themselves of God's holy ordinances, 
does it not also follow that on all men devolves 
directly the duty of making the State as nearly as 
possible what God has vrilled that His kingdom on 
earth should be, and that therefore the laity are not 
bound to wait (as the Belgians have been required 
by the Pope to do) for a Congress of Bishops to di- 
rect them as to the proper health, labor and poor 
laws which they should enact ? The old contest of 
the Reformation, of the laity against the caste of 
priests, of the light of grace against the light of 
nature, is therefore not ended. 

The nearest approach to the realization of this 
ideal relation of Church and State, has been m the 
colonies of Portugal and Spain ; from such a govern- 
ment — Good Lord deliver us ! 

Under how many reservations in favor of the 
eternal and natural law and of the directions of the 
infallible Roman guide in m.orals, must not a sincere 
Roman Catholic take the oath of allegiance? Is not 
his conception of the State necessarily very far from 
that of a brotherhood of men, working out God's 
will according to light of their consciences, and 
willing to sacrifice everything ''one for all and all 
for one,'' — to carry out the spirit of the cry '' E pluri- 
bus unum"? The oath of allegiance of a faith- 



87 

ful Roman Catholic must read about as follows: 
" I solemnly swear that I will support the Constitu- 
tion of the United States, except where it is contrary 
to the pontifical or natural or eternal law, and that I 
renounce allegiance and fidelity to all foreign sov- 
ereigns, except that in all rational or intentional acts 
I will obey the infallible direction of the Pontiff of 
Rome." 

The following lines from Doctor (now, the author 
believes, Cardinal) Hergenroether, in his Catholic 
Church and Christian State, seem worthy of *' a 
Daniel come to justice '' : '' No State can be re- 
quired to permit what will endanger its own 
existence and destroy the foundations of all social 
order. Yet there are sects and religions v/hich 

would do this Who would dream of 

requiring that these sects should be tolerated or 
recognized by the State, or deny that the State 
not only might but ought to resist them by all the 
means at its disposal ? No liberty is granted to doc- 
trines ... which threaten the constitution of 
the State and the observance of the civil laws.'* 

To cure this attachment of Roman Catholics to a 
foreign potentate but two remedies suggest them- 
selves : One is to inculcate the theory that, al- 
though the Pope contrDls reason and consequently 
conscience, still, on questions relating to the State, 
the reason or conscience is not to be exercised. 
This teaching results, of course, in complete obedi- 
ence of the subject to the ruler ; it can only be justi- 
fied through the argument that the Crown is as 
truly a divine institution as the Papacy. The Di- 



88 

vine Right of Kings is therefore directly due to the 
Divine Right of Popes ; it was the onl}^ possible 
antidote to the latter; see *' The Divine Right of 
Kings," by J. N. Figgis (Macmillan & Co., New 
York, 1896). It is therefore perfectly natural to find 
many Jesuit writers asserting the rights of the 
People as against the Crown, but by '' the People " 
was always understood a " Pope-guided people/' 
The partiality of Leo XIII. for Democracies is there- 
fore easily understood ; Vi^ith the Divine Right of 
Kings disappears his chief and onl}^ rival. A De- 
mocracy has no such dangerous enemy , the idea of 
popular sovereignty can never take the place of a 
personal sovereign ; moreover, the Pope, as guide 
of the human conscience or reason, can interfere 
whenever he pleases in the formation of this popu- 
lar idol. An independent republic and Roman 
Catholicism are therefore, from their very nature, 
incompatible. The only other remedy is, there- 
fore, to convince our Roman Catholic fellow-citi- 
zens of the truth of the proposition set forth be- 
low, in the chapter on the Church and Individual, 
in which it is shown that on no questions has a per- 
son the right to exile his reason or conscience, and 
place it, gagged and bound, in foreign hands ; but 
that, on the contrary, it is his most important duty 
to develop this talent to the utmost, through God's 
most holy ordinances, and to obey implicitly the 
warnings of this inspired monitor. No State has 
anything to fear from an appeal to man's conscience, 
in direct communion, without human mediation, 
with God the Holy Ghost. 



89 

If this second remedy is not applied thoroughly 
and speedily, then, as the author believes, is 
the prospect dark indeed. Then must echo the 
streets again with the cries, ''Hi, Guelph!" ''Hi, 
Ghibelline ! " Then must ring the pulpits again 
with denunciations of the Divine Right of Popes, 
as in the days of Elizabeth and James, and with 
praise for its only possible substitute, the Divine 
Right of Kings. 

The contest would be for the right to follow the 
inner light, to listen to the small, still voice, — for 
which Socrates drank his cup of hemlock. 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE CHURCH AND THE WORKINGMAN. 

From the prominence which the labor question 
bears in modern life, it was not to be expected that 
Leo XIII. would overlook it ; in fact, in the first 
year of his reign, he wrote denouncmg socialism and 
communism, and in 1891 he issued his famous Ency- 
clical '^Novarum rerum,*' in which he undertook to 
provide remedies for the distressing conditions of 
the laboring classes of the world. How strongly he 
felt this to be his duty and privilege the Encyclical 
expressly shows : '' It (the condition of labor) is a 
matter which we have touched once or twice already. 
But in this letter the responsibility of the Apostolic 
offices urges us to treat the question expressly and 
at length, in order that there may be no mistake as 
to the principles which truth and justice dictate for 
its settlement. . . . We approach the subject 
with confidence and in the exercise of the rights 
which belong to us ; for no practical solution for 
this question will ever be found without the assist- 
ance of religion and of the Church. It is we who are 
the chief guardians of religion and the chief dis- 
penser of what belongs to the church, and we must 
not by silence neglect the duty which lies upon us.** 

In the Encyclical to the Belgian Bishops (above 
cited) the social question is expressly claimed for 

90 



91 

the Church as falling within the domain of religion 
and morals. 

Nor is this view peculiar to Leo XIII. ; under the 
definition of morals as explained in a former chapter, 
the whole social system is included and the ordinary 
Roman Catholic text-books on Morality include chap* 
ters on all important social questions ; for example, 
the above cited work on Moral Philosophy by Father 
Russo, Father Rickabj^'s Moral Philosophy, F. 
Costa Rossetti*s Institutiones Ethicse et Juris 
Naturse. 

How imperative and final the plan is to be regarded 
by Roman Catholics, is shov/n also by the same 
Encyclical to the Belgian Bishops, cited in the Intro- 
duction, in which he prohibits the laity from discus- 
sing the social question in that country and summons 
a council of Bishops to consider it. How implicitly 
this infallible voice is followed also in these matters, 
appears from the unconditional acceptance of its 
teachings, even by Roman Catholic writers who had 
previously entertained most opposite views, such as 
M. Charles Revin, who, in his L'economie politique 
d'apres TEncy clique (Paris, 1891), referring to this 
Encyclical, declares, on page 21 : '^ The Church, be- 
hold our guide, our true master for the social ques- 
tion ; let us follow her and no one else. Let us have 
no other political economy than that which flows 
from her teachings on the labor question." 

Father Zahm, in his article on ^^ Leo XIII. and 
the Social Question," in the North American Re- 
view for August, 1 89s, says: ''We recognize in the 
earnest but tender vrords of the Pontiff, the divine 



92 

perfume of the Master, the precise lessons of the 
Fathers of the Church, and the carefully pondered 
and soundly democratic teachings of th^ Doctors of 
the Middle Ages.'' 

To understand the scheme of the Holy Father 
aright, we must bear in mind one sentence of this 
Encyclical : '' Let us now, therefore, inquire what 
part the State should play in the work of remedy 
and relief. By the State we here understand, not 
the particular form of government which prevails 
in this or that nation, but the State as rightly under- 
stood ; that is to say any government conformable in 
its institutions to right reason and natural law, and 
to those dictates of the Divine Wisdom which we 
have expounded in the Encyclical on the Christian 
Constitution of the State." 

To fill in any lacking details of the plan pro- 
posed, we must therefore suppose that before it can 
be carried out completely, the State must have been 
reorganized according to the principles laid down in 
the foregoing chapter, so that the relation of Church 
and State shall have become like that of the soul 
and body, and the Church would then of course be 
able to supply in its good judgment all that might 
be necessary to this scheme of social reform. 

One passage from this Encyclical is worth citing 
at this point to remind us of the superiority of the 
soul : '' It is the soul which is made after the image 
and likeness of God ; it is in the soul that sover- 
eignty resides, in virtue of which man is commanded 
to rule the creatures below him, and to use all the 
earth and the ocean for his profit and advantage." 



93 

The plan of the Encyclical, to state it in a few 
words, agrees substantially with the teachings of the 
State-socialists, laying special stress on the develop- 
ment of trades unions. But these organizations 
must consist exclusively of Roman Catholics ; he 
says : '^ But there is a good deal of evidence which 
goes to prove that many of these societies are in the 
hands of invisible leaders and are managed on prin- 
ciples far from compatible with Christianity and the 
public well-being ; and that they do their best to get 
into their hands the whole field of labor and to force 
workmen either to join them or to starve. Under 
these circumstances Christain workmen must do 
one of two things ; either join associations in which 
their religion will be exposed to peril, or form asso- 
ciations among themselves — unite their forces and 
courageously shake off the yoke of an unjust and 
intolerable oppression. No one who does not wish 
to expose man's chief good to extreme danger will 
hesitate to say that the second alternative must by 
all means be adopted. . . . It is clear that they 
(workingmen's association) must pay special and 
principal attention to piety and morality . . . Let our 
associations then look first and before all to God ; 
let religious instruction have therein a foremost 
place, each one being carefully taught what is his 
duty to God, what to believe, what to hope for and 
how to work out his salvation . . . Let him learn to 
reverence and to love mother Church, the common 
mother of us all . . . Such mutual associations 
among Catholics are certain to be productive in no 
small degree of prosperity to the State." 



94 

Moreover these organizations must be as inde- 
pendent as possible from the State : '' Particular 
societies, then, although they exist within the State, 
and are each a part of the State, nevertheless cannot 
be prohibited by the State absolutely and as such. 
For to enter into ' society ' of this kind is the natural 
right of man ; and the State must protect natural 
rights, not destroy them ; and if it forbids its citizens 
to form associations, it contradicts the very prin- 
ciple of its own existence ; for both they and it exist 
in virtue of the same principles, viz.: the natural 
propensity of man to live in society . . . But every 
precaution should be taken not to violate the rights 
of individuals and not to make unreasonable regula- 
tions under the pretense of public benefit. For laws 
only bind when they are in accordance with right 
reason and therefore with the eternal law of God. . . 
Let the State watch over these societies of citizens 
united together in the exercise of their right ; but 
let it not thrust itself into their peculiar concerns 
and their organization/ 

In a previous passage of the Encyclical, after re- 
commending a minimum wage, he proceeds : '^ In 
these and similar questions, however, such as, for 
example, the hours of labor in different trades, the 
sanitary precautions to be observed in factories and 
work shops, etc., in order to supersede undue inter- 
ference on the part of the State, especiall}' as circum- 
stances, times and localities differ so widely, it is ad- 
visable that recourse be had to societies or boards 
such as we shall mention presently, or to some other 
method of safe guarding the interests of wage 



95 

earners ; the State to be asked for approval and pro- 
tection." 

Each association is to consist of employers as 
well as employed. '' If it should happen that either 
a master or a workman deemed himself injured, 
nothing would be more desirable than that there 
should be a committee composed of honest and 
capable men of the association itself, v/hose duty it 
should be, by the laws of the association, to decide 
the dispute. Among the purposes of a society 
should be to try to arrange for a continuous supply 
of work at all times and seasons ; and to create a 
fund from Vv^hich the members may be helped in 
their necessities, not only in cases of accident, but 
also in sickness, old age and misfortune.'' 

From the foregoing extract it is evident that the 
Infallible Head of the Roman Church has decided in 
favor of that school of political economy which in 
Germany is represented by Abbe Schings, the 
director of the Christlich Sociale Blatter, and in 
France by Leon Harmel, the proprietor of the great 
factory at Val-des-Bois ; both of these writers repre- 
sent the free guild system as opposed to the plan of 
compulsory guilds, under the superintendence of the 
State ; the latter plan is advocated in Germany by 
Baron Hitze and in France by the Count de Mun. 
If we therefore turn to the writers first mentioned 
we find a plainer and bolder picture of the plan 
which Leo XIII. evidently had in his mind and of 
which he drew the outline in his Encyclical. Thus 
Schings writes : '' The old corporations (guilds) 
were created by the Church. And it was because 



96 

they were religious associations and maintained their 
character as such that they preserved their vigor 
and stability. . . . The Christian spirit is a family 
tie, uniting together masters, fellow v/orkmen and 
apprentices, and the destruction of this spirit by the 
Renaissance and the Reformation was the death 
blow to the corporations. How then can these new 
compulsory corporations, which must necessarily 
comprise all workmen without any distinction of 
creed — how then can they be expected to produce the 
same beneficial results ? How then can you expect to 
find a family spirit in the workshop where the m.aster 
is a Protestant, the foreman a Jew, the apprentice a 
Catholic, or vice versa} A guild composed of 
Catholics and Protestants could have no real con- 
sistence and would merely have an external appear- 
ance of union maintained perhaps by the police/' 
To the same effect speaks Leon Harmel in the As- 
sociation Catholique des Patrons du Nord : " We 
will not upon any account accept the compulsory 
guilds because the combining of unequal and fre- 
quently opposed elements can only, from the moral 
point of view, produce disastrous effects. Those 
who would build in company must first speak the 
same language ; now. Catholics and free thinkers 
have an entirely different language: the first call 
honor that which the others deem cowardice, the 
second call liberty what the others consider as 
slavery ; the former are ready to give their life for 
their duty, while the latter hold rebellion as the 
first of duties. On all arguments concerning virtue, 
probit}^ disinterestedness, the origin and aim of life, 



97 

they each speak a separate language. How then 
could they act in concert in re-constructing a moral 
fabric which demands unity and community of 
effort ? " 

Father Liberatore in his Principles of Political 
Economy, which is supposed to have served as a 
suggestion for the Papal Encyclical, speaks to the 
same effect (page 289): '' Clearly corporations ought 
to be founded on religion. . . . Here the Austrian 
corporations are wide of the mark, being compelled 
to admit * oves et boves universas, insuper et pecora 
campi/ Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and even 
atheists are indiscriminately brought together there- 
in ; so that the basis of these societies is not relig- 
ious, but purely economic. This is the result of the 
compulsory system, which is also against harmony 
of thought and feeling. . . . The danger of in- 
timacy between people of different religions may be 
much obviated by instituting for the Catholics, pious 
congregations to serve as an antidote and bind them 
together as a separate unity. Thus whereas in 
former days Corporations arose out of Confraterna- 
ties, Confraternities would now come out of Corpor- 
ations . . . (page 293): The Christian Corpor- 
ation, so far as its organizing and its internal admin- 
istration are concerned, should be formed and main- 
tained independently of the State. This is essential ; 
for the State, separated from the Church and from 
God, would influence it badly. A Christian Corpor- 
ation should be professedly and tlioroughly religious, 
faithfully keep the laws of the Church, and obey de- 
voutly the Vicar of Jesus Christ. How then can it 



98 

accept the interference of governments that are 
either hostile to the Catholic religion or at least in- 
different to it? The Corporation must keep clear 
of rulers whose touch defiles. * May God preserve 
us/ says Claude Janet, 'from seeing the modern 
State add this social policy to its other numerous 
invasions of the rights of the individual and of the 
family/ '' 

In the Encyclical of Leo XIII. addressed to the 
American Bishops, dated Jan. 6th, 1 895 , and beginning 
with the word '' Longinqua, ' there are several sen- 
tences which add a few touches to the sketch con- 
tained in the Encyclical on Labor, showing still 
more plainly that the plan of the writer last above 
cited is the one he bears in mind : *' But it is very 
important to take heed with whom they (Roman 
Catholic workingmen) are to associate else, while 
seeking aids for the improvement of their condition, 
they may be imperilling far weighter interests. 
. . . Nay, rather, unless forced by necessity 
to do otherwise, Catholics ought to prefer to 
associate with Catholics, a course which would be 
very conducive to the safe guarding of their faith. 
As president of Societies thus formed among them- 
selves, it would be well to appoint either priests or 
upright laymen of weight and character, guided by 
whose councils they should endeavor peacefully 
to adopt and carry into effect such measures as 
may seem most advantageous to their interests, 
keeping in view the rules laid down by us in our 
Encyclical Rerum Novarum." 

As Father Zahm savs in the North American 



99 

Review of August, 1895 : '' The Encyclical Longin- 
qua Oceani Spatia recently issued is, in a measure 
but a supplement of Rerum Novarum/* 

How important a part the priestly president of 
such a society would play will be plain when we re- 
member that both employers and employed are to 
be members, as in the so-called mixed syndicates of 
France, and that the priest would have to act the 
part of mediator or umpire between them. Father 
Liberatore, in his above cited work, seems to have 
again been followed on this point : ^^ The mixed Syndi- 
cate is the only sound one. By uniting masters and 
workmen it paves the way for a true Corporation. 
. . . (Page 294) : This (government of Christian 
corporation), however, must be understood in a 
hierarchical manner ; so that the highest places be 
filled by the masters, who are superiors born of the 
Corporation ; the next by the principal and best 
workmen, the lowest by the w^hole multitude as hav- 
ing the right to select their representatives, and thus 
by means of them watch over the management and 
distribution of what is owned in common." 

In an earlier Encyclical entitled Humanum Genus, 
in 1884, Leo XIII. had already said : ** In the third 
place there are certain institutions wisely estab- 
lished by our forefathers, and which in the course of 
time have been dropped, which may become at the 
present time the type and model, as it were, of sim- 
ilar institutions. We speak of those guilds or asso- 
ciations of workingmen which aim at protecting, 
with the guidance of religion, their worldly inter- 
ests and morality. And if our ancestors, after the 
experience of ages, appreciated so fully the utility 



lOO 

of such institutions, our age values it even more 
highly on account of the peculiar power they afford 
of crushing the strength of the sects, . . . For 
these reasons and for the common welfare we fer- 
vently wish to see these guilds, so suited to the 
time, re-established under the auspices and patron- 
age of the Bishops/' {^' Leo XIIL," by Rev. James 
F. Talbot, D. D., page 338.) The term ^^ sects" 
does not refer to religious bodies, but includes all 
who are known as Naturalists in philosophy or 
Liberals in politics, as was shown in the first chapter. 

No modern student of political economy will doubt 
that Leo XIIL was right in assigning the most im- 
portant place in the solution of the social question to 
labor organizations. But the question is submitted, 
if the papal plan to form trade organizations consist- 
ing exclusively of Roman Catholics and formed 
expressly for the purpose of '^crushing the sects*' 
under the leadership of the priest, succeeds, what 
will be the fate of other workingmen? In his Labor 
Encyclical, above cited Leo XIIL has already de- 
clared that unorganized labor in competition with 
labor unions will be driven to starvation. As Pro- 
testants are not to be admitted to these Roman 
Catholic organizations, what is left to them but to 
form organizations of their own or be persecuted as 
"scabs?" 

Is it not a plan to grind the State between the 
Church as an upper and the Trade Organization as a 
lower millstone ? How can the State surrender in 
effect the whole control of its industry and the whole 
field of labor to this papal, international organization 
of priests? 



IC'I 

What an important part such priest-guided labor 
organizations would play in politics is evident 
enough. Many recognize that the political units of 
the future in great cities will be, not the sub-divisions 
of the city according to geographical lines, but the 
groups of men organized according to their trades 
and professions ; the author v/ould refer on this 
point to '' Trade Unions/' by William Trant, and 
to the author's '^ Trade Unions in Politics.'' No 
one, then, can charge the Papal Church with lack 
of foresight, in endeavoring to keep these future 
powers under her control and '' clear of rulers 
whose touch defiles." In Germany, the hundred 
thousand members of the Catholic Labor Unions take 
part in politics most actively as such, whenever a 
question arises in which the Church is interested. 

The argument of the Holy Father in his Labor 
Encyclical to prove this independence of the trade- 
unions from the State is as follows : '' These lesser 
societies and the society which constitute the State 
differ in many things, because their immediate 
purpose and end is different. Civil society exists for 
the common good, and therefore is concerned with 
the interests of all in general, and with individual 
interest in their due place and proportion. Hence, 
it is called public society, because by its means, as 
St. Thomas of Aquinas says, men communicate with 
one another in the setting up of a commonwealth. 
But the societies which are formed m the bosom of 
the State are called private, and justly so, because 
their immediate purpose is the private advantage of 
the associates. Now a private society, says St. 



I02 

Thomas again, is one which is formed for the purpose 
of carrying out private business, as when two or 
three enter into a partnership with a view of trading 
in conjunction/* 

To class trade organizations with business part- 
nerships and to say that because the one is a private 
organization and independent of the State, therefore 
the other ought also to be so, is not very convincing. 
The history of the Middle Ages is one long story of 
the struggle of the trade organizations to take part 
in the government ; it is the glory of Germanic laws 
to have afforded scope for this desire, instead of 
crushing it, as did the Roman lav/, which latter law 
the Roman Catholic socialists are generally so fond 
of denouncing. See Beseier * Deutsches Privat- 
recht,*' p. 251. 

If we turn now from this particular scheme of 
Roman Catholic trade unions, to the general teach- 
ings of the Church on social questions, how are they 
adapted to our modern civilization? It is sub- 
mitted that the modern communism, against which 
Leo XIII. so frequently inveighs under the name of 
Socialism, is practically identical in its fundamental 
principles with teachings of the Church, except that 
it disregards the sovereignty of the successors of 
St. Peter. 

St. Thomas Aquinas had before him the ideals of 
Plato and Aristotle and accepted their Utopias in 
principle without reserve ; thus he says, in De 
Regimine Principum (lib. IV., Cap. X.) : '' He (Plato) 
divided his state into five classes of men, viz.: princes^ 
counsellors, warriors, mechanics and farmers. This 
division seems sufficient for the protection of the 



I03 

State, since it comprises all varieties of men neces- 
sary to a political government." He makes substan- 
tially the same division in the Summa (I., II., 9, 95, 
a. 4) : '' Human law can be divided according to the 
difference of those who devote themselves especially 
to the common weal, as priests who pray for the 
people to God, princes who rule the people and 
soldiers who fight for the safety of the people and 
therefore to these men certain especial rights are 
due," 

This whole system of special rights or privileges was 
known as '' justitia distributativa '' as opposed to the 
other great division of law *' justitia commutativa" 
which concerns the legal relation of individuals to 
each other. The definition of distributive justice, 
with which no communist would quarrel in Summa 
II., II., q. 96, I a. I, IS as foUovv^s : '' Or again we have 
the relation of the whole to the part ; and such is the 
relation of the community to the individual, which 
relation is presided over by distributive justice or 
the justice that distributes the goods of the cornvton stock 
according to proportion.' 

The authority for this whole system of distribu- 
tive or class justice is the philosopher Aristotle, 
who is continually cited. How Aristotle regarded 
this class system can be seen from the following 
extract from his Politics (Book VII., Chap. 9): 
'' Now, since we are here speaking of the best form 
of government and that under which the State will 
be most happy, it clearly follows that in the State 
which is best governed the citizens who are abso- 
lutely and merely relatively just men must not lead 



104 

the life of mechanics or tradesmen, for such a life 
is ignoble and inimical to virtue. Neither must 
they be husbandmen, since leisure is necessary 
both for the development of virtue and the per- 
formance of political duties. Again, there is in a 
State a class of warriors and another of counsellors 
who advise about the expedient and determine mat- 
ters of law, and these seem in an especial manner 
parts of a State . . . whereas mechanics or any 
other class whose art excludes the art of virtue have 
no other share in the State. . . . The husbandmen 
will of necessity be slaves or barbarians or Perioeci. 

'-' Of the classes enumerated there remains only the 
priests, and the manner in which their office is to be 
regulated is obvious. No husbandman or mechanic 
should be appointed to it. Now since the body of 
the citizens is divided into two classes, the warriors 
and the counsellors, to the old men of these two clas- 
ses should be assigned the duties of the priesthood 
— husbandmen, craftsmen and laborers of all kinds 
are necessary to the existence of states, but the parts 
of the State are the warriors and counsellors. And 
these are distinguished severally from one another, 
the distinction being in some cases permanent, in 
others not." 

Plato, in his Republic, as is well known, gave the 
masses no share in the government and considered 
them unworthy of the slightest attention, and made 
a similar division of ruling classes, who constituted 
the actual state. 

In reading these lines of Aristotle, do we not seem 
to hear the very words of some grand seigneur or of 



105 

some aristocratic abbe of the Ancien Regime which, 
under the rule of the Eldest Son of the Church in 
France, had developed so successfully the doctrine of 
several estates, with their caste-like divisions of the 
people ? No wonder the Roman Catholics are loud 
in their denunciations of the Vv^ork of the French 
Revolution and lavish with their glowing pictures 
of the ''good old times." 

Our legal system, with its doctrine of equality of 
all before the law, has no place for '' Distributive 
Justice." Is it not then apparent that the French 
Communists were orthodox theologians? They 
wanted merely a share of '' the goods of the com- 
mon stock,'* and only differed with the First and 
Second Estates as to the proportion which each 
should receive. 

How conversant Leo XIIL was with this principle 
of division of a people into classes and distributive 
justice appears by the following extract from the 
Labor Encyclical, in which he cites the chapter 
of the Summa last above mentioned : '' To cite the 
wise words of St. Thomas of Aquin : As the part 
and the whole are in a certain sense identical, the 
part may in some sense claim what belongs to 
the whole. Among the many and grave duties of 
rulers who would do their best for the people, 
the first and chief is to act with strict justice — with 
that justice which is called in the schools distribu- 
tive — toward each and every class." 

This idea of a central government to which all 
classes look for their support isirradicably ingrained 
in the Roman Catholic mediaeval system which con- 



io6 

sidered the particular government of the ''Holy 
Roman Empire," as directly instituted by God, being 
symbolized in the coronation of the Emperor by the 
Pope as vicar of Jesus Christ ; and under the Em- 
peror every official held office by Divine Right. 
The individual was consequently absorbed in the 
whole; as St. Thomas Aquinas says in Summa II., II., 
q. 58, a. 5: *' All who are comprised in a community 
stand to the community as parts to the whole ; now 
all that the part is, belongs to the whole ; hence 
everything good in the part is reierrable to the good 
of the whole; " and he continues in the same chapter, 
article ninth ; '' the common good is the aim of all 
individuals existing in a community, as the good of 
the whole is the object of all the parts.*' He also 
frequently reiterates that the individual exists for 
the good of the species. 

Is not this doctrine the same as that of the most 
radical Socialist, who, flying to the opposite ex- 
treme from individualism, would merge the citizen 
completely in the State, and treat him only as a cell 
in an organism, ignoring his personality and direct 
responsibility to a Heavenly Power? Is not this 
system the extreme of paternalism and centralization, 
with its inevitable deadening of all individual effort, 
from which our government is supposed to be a di- 
rect revolt ? 

All Catholic Socialists unite in denouncing Liber- 
alism and in repeating the boast that the subjection 
of rulers and nations to the Papacy would result in 
the attainment of all that the French Revolution 
vainly demanded. 



I07 

When the Count de Mun, the leader of one of the 
wings of French Catholic Socialists, introduced a 
bill regulating labor, into the French Parliament in 
1890, Ferroul, the Socialist Deputy, exclaimed : ''I 
have read M. de Mun's declarations, and together 
with my friends cannot but commend them ; his de- 
mands are in reality identical with those formulated 
by the Socialist Congresses." 

On the other hand. Baron von Vogelsang, the 
leader of the Austrian Catholic Socialists, laments 
that the French Revolution overthrew the old social 
order which rested on the fundamental principles 
that all property should be as a part of the common 
fortune of the nation, granted for private enjoyment 
in exchange for services rendered to the community. 
(See the Association Catholique, May, 1888.) 

Nitti in his Catholic Socialism (p. 29) states cor- 
rectly : '' All the great Catholic economists, as Von 
Ketteler, Hitze, Weiss, De Mun, De Curtins, hold 
that so-called economic liberty is an iniquitous 
principle, contrary to all the laws of Christianity." 

The greatest Roman Catholic publicist of this 
century, De Maistre following Aquinas and Aristotle, 
(in his '' Essai sur le'principe generateur and Soirees 
de St. Petersburg "), claimed that the nobility as a 
separate class with all its privileges, was a divine 
institution with which it was impious to interfere. 

One of the main causes of the dissatisfaction 
among the subjects of the Pope, while he still had 
temporal power, was that the priests constituted a 
privileged caste ; see the citation from Dr. Dcill- 
inger's description of the Papal State, in the first 



io8 

chapter of this book. In the Province of Quebec in 
Canada, ever since the '* Customs of Paris " were re- 
stored in 1774, the class distinctions and extensive 
legal privileges of the clergy, which existed in 
France before the Revolution, have been continued. 
The many bloody revolutions in Mexico were only 
struggles to overcome the tyranny of the priests 
and soldiers, whose claims to be tried in special 
courts of their own, composed exclusively of either 
clergy or officers, vras most strongly supported by 
the Church : see the article in the North American 
Review for January, 1896, by the Mexican Minister 
at Washington, on the " Philosophv of Mexican 
Revolutions. 

All therefore who believe that society exists for 
men, and not men for society, and in the equality of 
all before the law should oppose this Church Social- 
ism, which calls upon the Fourth Estate to undo the 
work of the Third Estate in the French Revolution, 
not only that it may introduce a rigid mediaeval 
communism, but also that it may restore the First 
and Second Estates to their former positions. 

There is another objection to Roman Catholic 
Socialism vrhich will be better understood after a 
perusal of the chapter on the Church and the Indi- 
vidual, in its denial of the existence of the spiritual 
part of man's nature. The consequence is that even 
while men remain good Roman Catholics and under 
the guidance of the Church, they are thrown too 
much for the satisfaction of the wants of their entire 
being upon the physical and intellectual treasures of 
this world, and when once thev throw off the control 



I09 

of the Church, as has been the case in all countrieji 
with the spread of education, they become too eager 
in the pursuit of that which will please their senses, 
regardless of the claims of their higher or spiritual 
nature. 

Over thirty years ago, Bishop Ketteler declared 
from his cathedral at Mayence : ^' The Social Ques, 
tion is a stomach question" (Nitti, Catholic Social- 
ism, p. 355). The teachings of Roman Catholic 
philosophy are, as will be shown hereafter, that men 
are simply physical and sentient organisms, and the 
result of such teachings is always practically a 
materialism, identical with that of the extreme com- 
munist. The eagerness with which that part of the 
Roman Catholic clergy which was least bound by 
the Papal authority, took up the Henry George 
movement and defended it on theological grounds, 
may serve as an example to show how naturally 
Roman Catholics become communists, so soon as 
the restraint from above is relaxed. Mr. George's 
book, by the way, has never been put upon the 
Index. The most extreme and dangerous com^ 
munists are the products of Roman Catholic 
countries ; see Flint's Socialism (p. 449). 

If Leo XII I. is right in the statement which he 
lays down in the Encyclical on Labor (above cited) 
that ^^ the first and chief duty " of a ruler is '' dis- 
tributive justice," — /. e., the distribution of the 
goods which constitute the common stock, to the 
various classes, how does he differ in principle from 
St. Simon or any other communist, except that in 
•lis trade unions ''no Protestant need apply"? Is 



no 

not this exclusive spirit the severest charge against 
the A. P. A.? In brief, his plan is a priest-ruled com- 
munism ; of which good practical illustrations are 
found in the history of the Jesuit colony of Para- 
guay or of the Missions of Mexico ; their civilization 
consisted of priests and peons. 

If the priest, will but, like the cobbler, ^' stick to 
his last '' and attend to the development of man's 
spiritual nature, instead of attempting the direct 
government of the world, in its minutest details, 
the germ of sympathy in the heart of every man 
would blossom out into such love of neighbor that 
organizations of employers and employees acting 
together in harmony (as set out in the author's 
'' Trade Organizations in Religion ") would make us 
soon forget that there had ever been a social 
question. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE CHURCH AND THE FAMILY. 

Having shown in the preceding chapters how the 
rights of the State would be ground down between 
the Church and the Workingmen's Guild, acting like 
an upper and nether millstone, let us now consider 
whether there is a third institution which would 
still further lessen these rights. 

The following extract from the Encyclical of Leo 
XIII. on Labor speaks for itself: '* A family, no 
less than a State, is, as we have said, a true society 
governed by a power within itself, that is to say by 
the Father. Wherefore, provided the limits be not 
transgressed which are prescribed by the very pur- 
poses for which it exists, the Family has at least 
equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit 
of those things which are needful to its preservation 
and its just liberty. We say, at least equal rights ; 
for since the domestic household is anterior both in 
idea and fact to the gathering of men into a common- 
wealth, the former must necessarily have rights and 
duties which are prior to those of the latter, and 
which rest more immediately on nature. If the 
citizens of a State, that is to say, the Families on en- 
tering into association and fellowship, experienced 
at the hands of the State hindrance instead of help, 
and found their rights attacked instead of being pro- 
tected, such association was rather to be repudiated 



112 

than sought after. The idea then, that the civil 
government should, at its own discretion, penetrate 
and pervade the Family and the household, is a 
great and pernicious mistake and to speak with strict- 
ness, the child takes its place in civil society not in 
its own right, but in its quality as a member of the 
Family in which it is begotten. And it is for the 
very reason that ' The child belongs to the Father,' 
that, as St. Thomas of Aquin says : ' Before it at- 
tains the use of free will, it is in the power and care 
of its parents ' (St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae^ 
II., 11. , q. lo, a. 12).'' 

The theory of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Family 
is set out more at length in the Summa I., II., q 105, a. 
4, where his conclusion is as follows : '' Concerning 
domestic persons which are either servant and mas- 
ter, or man and wife, or finally father and child, 
the Old Testament gave precepts, rightly and con- 
veniently for the preservation of human life.'* 

The important part which the Family and Tribe 
played in Jewish history, preceding the organization 
of the State, is well known ; and in most of the Greek 
cities, men bound together by ties of blood, were 
important political factors in their early history. See 
Aristotle's Politics I., 2. It is therefore not to be 
wondered at that St. Thomas should place the 
Family as a society on an equality with the State, 
as he does in Comm. in Lib. Ethic.Aristot., Lect. L, 
L. I., making the State, the Family, and the Indi- 
vidual the three subdivisions of moral philosophy. 
He concludes : '' And hence it is that moral philos- 
ophy is divided into three parts. Of which one 



113 

treats of the intentional acts of a single man, which 
is called monastica ; but the second considers the 
operation of a domestic group, which is called cecono- 
mica; but the third considers the operations of a 
civil group, which is cd^^di political 

As the Supreme Pontiff is the infallible guide in 
all matters of morals, it is really unnecessary to say 
anything more to show that in all matters relating 
to family life, as a part of the domain of morals, the 
Church has the deciding voice and the State can act 
only on sufferance ; particularly is this plainly de- 
clared with regard to the marriage relation, which 
is the foundation of family life. In the Encyclical of 
Leo XIII. , issued February loth, 1880, on Marriage 
and Divorce (printed in the London Tablet), he says : 

^' Then, to make sure that such singular blessings 
should remain on earth as long as mankind itself, 
He established the Church as the Dispenser of His 
gifts, and, foreseeing the future He ordained that 
she should regulate all disturbances in human socie- 
ty, and reestablish whatever might fall into decay. 

. . . Jesus Christ, then, when he had again restored 
marriage to such great perfection, remitted and 
entrusteditsentire disposition to the Church. The 
Church, in fact, exercised this power over the 
marriages of Christians, in all times and in all places ; 
she exercised it in such a manner that it could easily 
be seen that this power was her own ; that it did not 
come to her through the consent of men, but that 
she had come by it by the divine will of her 
Author. . . . 

** It was then with full jurisdiction that the Council 



114 

of Trent defined that it is in the power of the Church 
to establish invalidating impediments and that matri- 
monial causes should come under the jurisdiction 
of ecclesiastical tribunals. 

'' Nor must any one allow himself to be moved by 
that distinction, or rather sundering, proclaimed by 
royal civilians, which consists in separating the 
nuptial contract from the Sacrament, leaving the 
Sacrament to the Church, and giving the contract 
over to temporal princes. 

*^ Therefore neither does reason prove, nor does 
history, which is the witness of the times, give testi- 
mony that authority over Christain marriage has 
ever been given over to temporal princes. And if 
the rights of any one have been violated in this 
manner, no one can ever say that the Church violated 
them. 

'' It cannot be doubted that Jesus Christ, the Foun- 
der of the Church, desired the religious authority 
to be distinct from the civil authority, and that each, 
be free in the fulfilment of its mission ; it must, 
however, be added, that it is useful to both, as it is 
to the interest of all men, that union and concord 
exist between them and that in such questions as 
from divers reasons, are common to the laws and 
jurisdictions ot both, the one to whom human afifairs 
have been entrusted should justly and reasonably 
depend upon the one having the guardianship of 
heavenly things. By this arrangament and agree- 
ment not only is a perfect organization of each 
power arrived at, but also the most opportune and 
the most efficacious means of securing the happiness 



115 

of the human race in regard to our conduct in this 
life and to the hope of eternal salvation. 

" Devote your zeal and your energies that the 
people may abundantly receive the precepts of 
Christian wisdom and that they may ever bear in 
mind that marriage was established not by the will 
of men but by authority of God, and that its funda- 
mental law is to unite one with one only, that Christ 
the Author of the new Alliance, transformed into a 
Sacrament that which was merely an act of nature, 
and in so much as concerns the bond, he has trans- 
mitted to his Church the* power of legislating and 
passing judgment upon it. It is necessary to be very 
watchful on this point, and to see that minds be not 
misled into error by the deceitful theories of enemies 
who seek to rob the Church of this power.'* 

It will be noted that the Encyclical is quite vague 
in stating the ground for its claim of authority in 
favor of the Church in matrimonial matters as in 
fact none can be found ; but His Holiness insists 
that the State must prove its title to such right, and 
should depend upon the Church in such matters, 
as in all others which are subject to the jurisdiction 
oi both. 

How faithfully and boldly these doctrines are 
taught, even in this country, may appear from the 
following extract from two leading Roman Catholic 
writers. Thus Father Jouin, S. J., Professor at St. 
John's College, Fordham, writes in his *' Elementa 
Philosophias Moralis ' (p. i8i): " Matrimonial society 
was instituted by God and its nature was determined 
by him ; therefore, it does not depend on civil soci- 



ii6 

ety. Matrimonial society antedates civil society ; 
since civil society grew from the union of families 
into one community, and the whole human race 
traces its origin from one family. Therefore, nature 
and the rights of matrimonial society w^ere already 
existing before civil society existed. Therefore, so 
far as the nature of matrimonial society and its prin- 
cipal rights are concerned, the civil authority can 
establish nothing. Moreover, the family fully con- 
stituted and endowed into all its rights, enters civil 
society ; therefore, civil society is to protect the 
rights of the family, not to create or change them. , . 
The right of contracting marriage is derived by 
man from nature, independently of the civil authority. 
Therefore, the right cannot be taken away by the 
civil authority. But it is taken away if impediments 
to marriage are created by the civil authorities; 
therefore, the latter cannot create impediments to 
marriage . . . matrimony is a Sacrament in the 
New Testament. The Church in the Sacrament can 
change nothing which pertains to the subject of the 
Sacrament, since the Sacraments were instituted by 
our Lord Jesus Christ ; but it has the power of de- 
creeing those things w^hich are necessary to rightly 
receiving and administrating the Sacrament. If, 
therefore, the Church decrees that certain persons in 
certain cases are not proper to partake of the Sacra- 
ment, then their marriage is not valid ; for according 
to the New Testament there is no marriage where 
there is no Sacrament. Marriages, therefore, which 
are not recognized by the Church are nvill and void 
before God, although the civil law declares them 



117 

valid. On the contrary, if a marriage is recognized 
by the Church, although the civil law declares it in- 
valid, it is and remains valid in spite of the civil 
law." 

The independence of the Family of the State is 
declared with equal courage by Father Nicolaus 
Russo, S. J., in his '' De Philosophia Morali Prselec- 
tiones," printed with the approbation of the Vicar- 
General of this diocese in 1890 (p. 216) : " If, there- 
fore, it is unlawful to bring civil authority into any 
marriage — in regard to the Christian marriage, this 
must be called not only illegal but impious." On 
page 236, he also declares that one cannot doubt 
that persons, not separate, but as families entered 
society, and that it is absurd to consider the State as 
a source of all rights (p. 215); here the author is of 
course again follov/ing Aristotle (Politics, I., 2). 

In the relation of parent and child, the Church 
draws a conclusion of no less practical importance 
than that above advanced on the marriage relation, 
from the alleged independence of the Family of the 
State; t, c, the right of the parent to direct the edu- 
cation of his children, free from the control of the 
State. This claim rests ultimately on the theory of 
St. Thomas Aquinas, announced in Summa II., II. q. 
10, a. 12 (above cited), that the law of the Old Testa- 
ment still governs the family life; thus he says in 
Summa I., II., q. 105, a. 4 : '' Concerning sons, it (the 
Old Testament) instituted that fathers should teach 
them, by instructing thcin in the faith ; whence it 
is said in Exodus 12 : ^ When your sons shall say to 
you, what is this service? You shall say to them: 



Ii8 

it is the sacrifice of the passover of the Lord. And 
also that they should instruct them in morals/ 

Father Jouin, of St. Johns College, m his Elements 
Philosophise Moralis argues m the same spirit (p. 
314) : '' The right of educating the youth belongs to 
the parent, who, since they give being to it must 
also perfect it. But the duty of educating the youth 
and the rights of parent are independent ot civil 
society (citing the passage above quoted from the 
same book). Therefore parents cannot be deprived 
of this right by the civil authority." 

Father Russo, in his De Philosophiae Morali Prae- 
lectiones (above cited), following the same theory of 
the independence of the Family, on page 221 sums 
up as follows : '' The duty and consequently the 
right of educating the youth (i) rests on the parent. 
Therefore (2) the State cannot claim this right ; and 
much less (3) compel parents to send their children 
to so-called pubhc schools." 

Of course this right of the parent is claimed only 
for the purpose of asserting that the parent can 
delegate it to the Church and exclude the State from 
even such control as is required to see that the child 
is brought up with the knowledge which is neces- 
sary to make it a useful and patriotic citizen ; see 
the article by Dr. Lyman Abbott m the Century 
Magazine of April, 1895. Where the Church is not 
yet all powerful, it is true that to the State is con- 
ceded some supervision, but this decreases as the 
power of the Church increases, until to the State is 
left only the duty of collecting the taxes to pay the 
clerical instructors. 



119 

Into the merits of Roman Catholic education it is 
unnecessary here to enter ; according to the Encyclo- 
psedia Brittanica, in Spain there are 82 schools to 
every 1,000 inhabitants, and yet 'J2 per cent, of the 
population can neither read or write. According to 
the same authority, in Italy, in 1861, before the 
invasion of the Piedmontese Robber, nearly 80 per 
cent, were '' analphabetes/' Any one who has trav- 
eled in Roman Catholic countries needs no statistics 
to tell him of the alarming illiteracy there prevailing. 
When the author was at Bolsano, near Rome, the 
richest man in the place, the innkeeper, told him that 
his daughter had completed her education at a 
neighboring convent, but no attempt was made to 
teach her to read or write. 

The most popular Lenten preacher at Rome in 
the chief Jesuit Church very recently declared that 
women ought not to be taught to read or write, be- 
cause they would only use this knowledge to write 
letters to their lovers after they were married. 

How easily any supervision, even when the right 
to prescribe the text books to be used is expressly 
reserved to the State, can be rendered nugatory, is 
frankly stated by Cardinal Satolli in the '' North 
American Review'' for December, 1894, in an article 
entitled '' The Catholic School System in Rome ": 

'* It (the Directive Council appointed by the Pope 
to supervise Roman Catholic education in Rome) 
therefore selects the text books with the greatest 
circumspection, and when it has been compelled by 
law to adopt any one which is erroneous or lack- 
ing in principle, it has strictly enjoined the pro- 



120 

fessors to make the necessary corrections and obser- 
vations when explaining the same. For example, in 
the official text-books of national history no reference 
is made to the gigantic and magnanimous struggle 
sustained by Christian society in honor and defence 
of religion and of the Roman Pontiff as well as in 
defence of the Fatherland and of Italian culture. . . . 
Catholic Teaching modifies and corrects errors and 
opinion in such a way that the historic truth may 
stand out with the utmost clearness. For the Church 
fears only error.'' 

Verily, the end justifies the means! 

How far one may go in distorting history and 
suppressing facts, to gam control of schools, is 
shown by a Review of the Manitoba School Ques- 
tion, published by the Winnipeg Tribune, entitled 
^^s Manitoba Right?" 

That so important a claim as that to the whole 
secular education should be based today ultimately 
upon the command given by God to the Children 
of Israel when about to journey through the Desert, 
on one point of ceremonical law, seems a little extra- 
ordinary ; but no less extraordmary is this whole 
claim for the independence of the Family from the 
State. Certainly no one can glance at our state or 
federal Constitutions without perceiving that our gov- 
ernments were in no way formed by families, and that 
the Family, as such, possesses no rights or privileges. 
Our legislature is supposed to be all powerful, ex- 
cept so far as expressly limited by our state or 
national constitutions. As Justice Ward, of the Su- 
preme Court of this State, expressly decided in the 



121 

case of St. Adelbert's Church (as cited in the Catholic 
Union and Times of July i8th, 1895}: '^Independent 
of statutory requirements, the canon law of the 
Roman Church is without force or authority in this 
country." 

If the Family is of such great importance to the 
State^ as it undoubtedly is, can the State be entirely 
indifferent to it ? 

It is moreover hard to understand how a consistent 
Roman Catholic can reconcile his duty as laid down 
by the above cited papal decrees with the allegiance 
which he swears to the law of the State. Is he to 
recognize a marriage which has been lawfully 
entered into accordmg to the laws of the State, but 
not according to the rules of the Church ? 

Nor is it to be presumed that his fellow citizens 
of other beliefs will look kindly upon teachings 
which echo the words of Pius IX., pronounced before 
the Apostolic Chancery (Discorsi delsommo Pontifici 
Pius IX., p. 193): "But, thanks to God, the mar- 
riage celebrated only by the civil authorities, with- 
out the intervention of the Church, is held for what 
it truly is, a mere concubinage (uno pretto con- 
cubinato)." 

If we turn to the third family relation, that of 
master and servant, we find that St. Thomas expressly 
recognizes the propriety of slavery as it existed 
under the Old Testament dispensation ; he par- 
ticularly discusses, in the article above cited (Summa 
I., II., q. 105, a. 4), whether any penalty should be 
inflicted upon a master who punishes his man or 
maid servant so severely that he or she dies within 



122 

a few days after receiving the chastisement and 
comes to a negative conclusion. 

The Angelic Doctor recognizes slavery as a natural 
institution in many other places, such as Summa, 11. , 
11. , q. 57, a. 3, where he cites Aristotle's Politics as 
authority for the proposition that it is useful for a 
man to be the slave of one v/ho is wiser. Aristotle's 
opinion was expressed in full as follows (I. Politics, 
c. 5) : '^ It is clear then that some men are by nature 
free, and others slaves, and that for these latter 
slavery is both expedient and right." We need 
not, therefore, be surprised that Father Jouin, of St. 
John's College, in his Elementa Philosophise Moralis, 
makes an elaborate defense of slavery (pp. 195 to 
203). Thus he says in paragraph 25 : '^Therefore 
the duty of giving all of one's exterior work to 
another is not against natural law. . . . There- 
fore slavery, properly so called, is not against natural 
law." 

It is curious to consider whether, it one institu- 
tion of natural law is as holy and as little to be 
interfered with by the State as another, all the 
anethemas which have been leveled against those 
who dared to interfere with the relation of parent 
and child and husband and wife, as sanctioned by 
natural law, do not apply with equal force to those 
who have abolished the institution of master and 
slave which has at least an equal sanction of levitical 
and natural law. 

The connection between '' Romanism " and '' Re- 
bellion " would therefore not seem so incredible. 

If on the other hand slavery, though justified by 



123 

natural law, could be destroyed, may not the Slate 
interfere with other institutions which are alleged to 
have the same high sanction, such as the Family and 
the Guild, when they have become oppressive and 
unsuited to the times ? 

How little the Church itself regards the Family, 
when it is to the Church's interest so to do, appears 
for example, in the Regulations concerning the 
Third Order of St. Francis, laid down by Leo XIII. 
(Leonis Papae XIII. AUocutiones, vol. I., p. 13), 
which provide that wives may be admitted to that 
order, even against the will of the husbands, if their 
confessors consent. How can the Christian ideal, 
that ''the husband is the head of the wife, even as 
Christ is the head of the Church " (Ephesians, v. 23), 
be carried into effect if every moral, i, e., intentional 
or rational act of the wife is subject to the control 
of another ? Do the hybrid populations of Central 
and South America, where the Church has had full 
control of the marriage relation, or the decadent 
royal families of the Bourbons, Wittelsbachs or 
Hapsburgs speak so well for its practical manage- 
ment of this relation ? 

In short, should not the priesthood, especially a 
celibate priesthood, keep its hands off the Family, 
as well as off the State, and even in matters of educa- 
tion should it not remember that its first duty is to 
educate the spirit or conscience, and only when that 
is accomplished, should it devote its surplus energy 
to the education of the intellect ? 

May it not be that this ill success is in part due to 
the philosophy of Aquinas and Aristotle which, as set 



124 

forth in the next chapter, holds that individuals are 
composed merely of body and intellect ? This theory 
denies to women the possession of those intuitive or 
spiritual faculties, in which she surpasses man and 
by which she is intended to develop and expand also 
in him the same organs, from their natural rudimen- 
tary condition to a rrov\'th and strength comparable 
to her own. To deny to women the possession of 
these faculties is to rob her of her chief glory and 
individuality, and to justify the mercenary contracts 
of marriage, so prevalent m southern Europe, where 
the property of the parties is considered of so much 
more importance than their personal qualifications 
and inclinations. It is submitted that the union of 
this spiritual part of man and woman constitutes the 
main object of matrimony, and that, when this union 
of spirits is blessed and invigorated by God's Holy 
Spirit, it becomes a new entity as really one, 
as the asexual monad with which, according to 
the Darwinian theory, animal life began ; so that 
the cycle of development which commences with 
physical unity and continues through generations 
of beings, sexually differentiated, is concluded in the 
Christian era, by a spiritual union, guided and blessed 
by the Holy Ghost and intended for eternity. 

The light condemnation of sexual sins, so often 
urged against the Jesuits and other Thomists, may 
also be charged to the philosophic disregard of this 
spiritual part of men and vromen, with which the 
Holy Ghost may directly communicate. Aquinas 
was confined in his argument for sexual purity to the 
claim that the offspring of illicit unions would not 



125 

be properly cared for, and he expressly declares that 
illicit intercourse is a carnal and not a spiritual sin, 
and not a sin directly against God(Summa,II., II., q. 
154, a. 3), thereby putting violations of the law of 
sexual purity— that law which constitutes the great 
cornerstone of happy martrimon}^ — among the 
lightest offences and in no way as a sin particularly 
against the Holy Spirit. And yet Chapter VI. of 
St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, of 
which Aquinas considered several verses in the 
article last above cited, closes with the emphatic 
lines, as given in the Douay version : ^^ Or know you 
not, that your members are the temple of the Holy 
Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God and 
you are not your own ? For you are bought with a 
great price. Glorify and bear God in your body/' 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE CHURCH AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 

In order to understand the relation of the Church 
to the Individual, we must first consider the Roman 
Catholic definition of the latter. 

In the Encyclical of Leo XIIL, in honor of St. 
Thomas Aquinas, he praises particularly the latter's 
treatment ^^ of man and the senses, of human acts 
and their principles." Turning then to the works 
of the Patron Saint of all Roman Catholic Schools 
and Colleges, we find, as already set forth in 
the first chapter, that the soul is the form of a 
man (Summa I., q. 76, a. 4), i. e,, that by which a 
human being is, moves and exists. This human 
form reasons and is, therefore, distinguished as 
forma rationalis from the form of plants, which is 
called forma vegetativa, and from the form of animals, 
which is called forma sensitiva. In fact, the Council 
of Vienne, as set forth in the first chapter, has raised 
this scholastic definition to a matter of faith, by con- 
demning as a heretic any one who should deny that 
" the rational or intellectual soul is not the form of 
a human body.*' 

This definition, as is well known, was only follow- 
ing Aristotle's teaching, e. g,, in his Politics I., 5 ; 
Boethius had already repeated it, by calling a person 
*' an individual substance of a rational nature ; *' 
it reappears in the (Ecumenical Council of the 

JC26 



T27 

Lateran V. (15 12), ^^ anima rationalis est pars et forma 
substantialis hominis, radix omnium proprietatum, 
ominum operationum, ex qua et corpore constitutum 
substantia humana/' 

This definition, it will be found, has been adhered 
to with customary fidelity by the writers on psychol- 
ogy of the now ruling Jesuit School in the Roman 
Catholic Church. Thus Dr. Plassman, the Theo- 
logical Lecturer in Rome, in his Psychology (p. 207), 
says : ^^ For the rational soul is in fact the sub- 
stantial form of man and the human body. . . . 
The substantial form is the radical principle of being 
and consequently of action." Father Maher, S. J., in 
the Psychology of the Stonyhurst series of Catholic 
Manuals of Philosophy (p. 521), declares: ''A person 
may accordingly be defined in scholastic language 
as a suppositum of a rational nature or an individual 
substance of a rational nature." This theory is 
defended with his customary vigor by Liberatore in 
his work on Universals (translated by Bering), page 
108, where the statement of the same doctrine by 
Pius IX. is set forth. 

Into the merits of this definition it is not neces- 
sary here to enter ; the citations are given merely 
to show that the reasoning soul is the form of man 
and consequently that there can be accord hig to 
their teachings, nothing in man except the body and 
the reasoning soul. The slightest acquaintance with 
scholastic philosophy vv^ill teach one tliat there can 
only be one form in a being and St. Thomas Aquinas 
devotes a chapter to the question (Sum ma I., q. ^(b, 
^'. 4): '* Whether in man there can be another f ;rin 



128 

beside the reasoning soul." He answers it of course 
in the negative, declaring it to be impossible, unless 
we erroneously assume as the Platonists did, that 
the soul merely moved the body. 

Leo XIII. adopts the same theory of the all 
powerful reasoning soul in man, to which the 
will is only the minister, in his Encyclical on St. 
Thomas Aquinas (above cited) and says : '' For since 
it is innate in the nature of man to follow reason 
as his guide, if his intellect is in anything, his will 
yields thereto." And again in the Enc3xlical of 
January lo, 1890, he says: ''The mind is the be- 
ginning of action." 

The next point which should be observed is that 
according to the Peripatetic School and the School- 
men, this rational soul of man has no innate ideas, 
but receives all that it knows through the senses, 
St. Thomas Aquinas accepts absolutely the famous 
saying of Aristotle : '' Nihil in intellectu nisi in sen- 
sibus," u e., '' Nothing is in the mind except through 
the senses." Thus Aquinas says in his Contra Gen- 
tiles (Lib. IV., c. 41) : '' Our intellect understands 
nothing except through appearances "(phantasmata), 
and again in Lib. I., c. 3 : ^' Our intellect takes knowl- 
edge from sense," and again in Summa I., II., q. 51, 
a. I : ''And therefore Aristotle shows that the knowl- 
edge of principles comes to us through the senses." 
In Summa, I., q. 79, a. 2, he says that the intellect 
is at first a ''tabula rasa." 

As Harper says in his Metaphysics of the 
School vol. I., p. 450); "In the origin of human 
thought, the senses stand midway between the In- 
tellect and Being ; ^o that the saying is trae — Tktre 



129 

is nothing in the intellect^ that has not first passed 
through the senses y 

It is true that Aquinas also recognizes the exis- 
tence in man of an '' abstractive virtue " by which 
the intellect can sequester the object recognized by 
the senses from the material conditions which bound 
it and consider it in its '' quiddity " ; but all this has 
nothing to do with innate ideas of right or wrong. 
As St. Thomas briefly expresses it : ^' Sensus est de 
particulari, intellectus de universali " (Plassmann^s 
First Volume of Philosophy, p. 334); see also Lib- 
eratore on Universals (translated by Bering), page 
167 and Soirees de Saint Petersbourg by De Maistre, 
page 140. 

Leo XIII. in his Encyclical on St. Thomas em- 
phatically commends this theory in its extreme form, 
saying: "As soon as the Scholastics, adopting the 
system of the earlier Fathers, found in their studies 
on anthropology that it is only through the medium of 
sensible things that the human intelligence is led to the 
knowledge of things without body and matter^ this at 
once was understood that nothing was more useful 
to the philosopher than a careful investigation of 
the secrets of nature.'' And again he says in his 
Encyclical on Church Unity (The Tablet of July 4, 
1896) : "- But it is obvious that nothing can be com- 
municated amongst men save by means of external 
things which the senses can perceive. Jesus Christ 
commanded His Apostles and their successors to \- 
the end of time to teach and rule the nations. He 
ordered the nations to accept their teaching and 
obey their authority. But this correlation of rights 



I30 

and duties in the Christian commonwealth not only 
could not have been made permanent but could not 
even have been initiated except through the senses, 
which are of all things the messengers and inter- 
preters." 

Following this principle, Aristotle taught that man 
can know nothing except through that which he 
already knows. Dr. Plassmann, in the introductory 
volume of his Philosophy (p. 256), as a faithful fol- 
lower of the Peripatetic School, even claims that all 
the grand and beautiful thoughts of the heathen were 
traditions derived through the Jews from Revelation. 

For a full statement of all the evil consequences 
of this Peripatetic sensualism, reference is made to 
Cousin's Elements of Psychology, especially pp. 
386-387. ' 

We see therefore that there is in Roman Catholic 
philosophy no room in man for anything except body 
and reason, and that therefore there is in him no 
spirit or conscience, distinct from reason. 

St. Thomas considered the question whether syn- 
deresis or conscience are powers and answers in the 
negative (Summa I., q. 79, a. 12 and a. 13), declaring 
conscience to be an act of reason and of nothing 
higher than reason, applied to moral questions, follow- 
ing Aristotle's Ethics, Book VI., Chapter 6. And 
again in Summa, I., II., q. 19, a. 5, he says: '' Since 
conscience is a dictate of reason, for it is an applica-. 
tion of knowledge to action, it is the same to ask 
whether a will, opposed to a mistaken reason is evil, 
as to ask whether an erring conscience is binding." 
He is followed of course in turn by such writers of 



131 

the Stonyhurst School as Father Rickaby in his 
Moral Philosophy (pp. 135-137). The latter writes: 
*' What then is conscience ? It is not a faculty, not 
a habit ; it is an act, it is a practical judgment of the 
understanding. . . . There is a hot controversy 
as to how these primary moral judgments arise in 
the mind. The coals of dispute are kindled by the 
assumption, that these moral judgments must needs 
have a totally other origin and birth in the mind 
than speculative first principles, as, that the whole is 
greater than the part, that two and two are four, 
that things which are equal to the same thing are 
equal to one another. The assumption is specious 
but unfounded.'' 

To the same effect writes Father Maher in his 
Psychology (p. 322) : ^^ The assumption of an addi- 
tional new faculty (conscience) is gratuitous. The 
intellect or reason which perceives the self-evident 
necessary truth that ^ Equals added to equals give 
equals,' is the same power which cognizes the 
validity of the self-evident axiom that ' We should 
do as we believe we ought to be done by.' " 

From this theory that conscience is a sub-depart- 
ment of reason arises the whole learning of '' prob- 
abilism," as set out for example in Gury's Cases 
of Conscience, so strange to one acquainted only 
with the Christianity of the New Testament. 

It follows, therefore, that the Roman Catholics are 
necessarily dichotomists or believers in the twofold 
division of man's personality into bod}^ and soul (or 
intellect) as opposed to the school of trichotomists 
who maintain with St. Paul that man has a tripartite 



132 

nature, viz., body, soul and spirit, as set forth, for ex- 
ample, in Heard's Tripartite Nature of Man (p. 83) : 
'' To sum up our remarks, then, on the contrast 
between psyche and pneuma in the five passages of 
New Testament (I. Thes. v. 23 ; Heb., iv 12; I. Cor. 
ii. II ; James iii. 15 ; Jude 19) which we have con- 
sidered at length, we gather the following distinction 
from Scripture. The psyche is the life of man in its 
widest and most inclusive sense, embracing not only 
the animal, but also the intellectual and moral facul- 
ties in so far as their exercise has not been depraved 
by the fall. In this sense Aristotle's generalization 
of the psyche is not wide of the Scriptural meaning. 
The soul, he says, is that by which we live, feel, or 
perceive, will, move and understand. . . . Were 
man made up of body and soul only, then the 
psychology of Scripture would be identical with 
that of Aristotle and a controversy of long standing 
might be set at rest at once and forever. But it is 
exactly where Aristotle leaves off that Scripture 
begins to treat of human nature, and tells us of a 
faculty — let us call it God-consciousness — which is 
dead or dormant in a great degree since the fall, and 
which it is the work and office of the Holy Ghost first 
to quicken and then to direct, sanctify, and govern. 
This faculty to which Scripture gives the name of 
Ruach or Pneuma, is altogether ignored by Aristotle, 
and confounded by Plato with the intellectual Nous. 
. . . He (Aristotle) was profoundly and we be- 
lieve sincerely unconscious of the divine faculty in 
man, for the reason given by the apostle that the 
psychical man perceives not the things of the Spirit 



133 

of God. He knew not of the Spirit's work, because 
he was ^ dead,' as all men by nature are to divine 
things." 

Among the early Christian Fathers Justin Martyr, 
Clement of Alexandria, Gregory Nyssen and Basil 
maintained the threefold nature of man, i, e, body,, 
soul and spirit. Thus Irenseus says in his Fifth 
Book against Heresies, chap, six : '' For that flesh 
which has been molded is not a perfect man in 
itself, but the body of a man ; neither is the soul 
Itself, considered a part by itself, the man, but 
it is the soul of a man and part of a man. Neither 
is the spirit a man, for it is called the spirit 
and not a man ; but the commingling and union 
of all these constitutes the perfect man. And 
for this cause does the Apostle, explaining himself, 
make it clear that the saved man is a complete man 
as well as a spiritual ; saying thus in the first Epistle 
of Thessalonians, ' Now the God of peace sanctify 
you perfect ; and may your spirit, soul and body be 
preserved whole without complaint to the coming of 
the Lord Jesus Christ.' " 

Tatian, in his Address to the Greeks, Chap. XII, 
(a. d. 1 10-172) declares '' We recognize two varieties 
of spirit one of which is called the soul {fj-vxv) but 
the other is greater than the soul, an image and like- 
ness of God.'' 

Among modern writers the matter is succinctly 
stated in Blunt's Theological Dictionary : 

'' But the ' soul ' of St. Paul's system is not the mere 
animal principle of Aristotle's system. It is, rather, 
an union of the rov^ and the fvxrj, of the reasoning 



i 



134 

faculty and the animating life ; the nvsvpia being a 
divine principle belonging to a new creation of su- 
pernatural being, which sprung from the incarnation 
of Diety (Mediation) and was the gift bestowed in 
the new birth of human nature (Spirit). This trichot- 
omy is the only psychological system which is rec- 
oncilable with the general statements of holy Scrip- 
ture respecting the soul." 

The practical difference which results from the 
adoption of one or the other of these theories is 
immense. According to the latter, the Christian 
needs no written code, '' long as the moral law.'' 
Love is the moral law to guide him in every circum- 
stance of life. Christ's promise that the Comforter 
would come after His departure is held good for all 
time. If men will but follow Christ's precepts and 
thus avail themselves of the means of grace which 
He provides, '' The Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver 
of Life " v/ill still speak directly to men's individual 
consciences, obliterating selfishness, the root of all 
evil, and substituting self sacrifice, love of God and 
the brethren; how much higher this is than knowledge 
as knowledge is above sensual pleasures, is beauti- 
fully set out in the closing chapters of '' God in His 
World." This was the Spirit which animated the 
Christians of the days described in the Acts of the 
Apostles, Epistles and the Ante-Nicene Fathers, 
entering into man's spirit and making it cry '' Abba, 
Father," as described so fully in the eighth chapter of 
the Epistle to the Romans, and endowing all men with 
an identical spirit of right and wrong, more or less 
developed, as they avail themselves of the means of 
grace, prescribed by Christ himself. 



135 

According to the former theory, as there was 
nothing in man except body and intellect, there was 
no conscience, no almost superhuman faculty, to 
which the Holy Ghost could speak. It follows, 
therefore, that the Holy Spirit was promised only 
to the Apostles and to the successors of one of them 
as bishops of Rome, to whom was thus committed 
the '' magisterium " or power to guide the intellects 
of all people, as claimed in the Encyclical on Chris- 
tian Unity. 

The evidence for the first part of this proposition 
is found in the words of our Lord as addressed to 
his Apostles, before His crucifixion, in which He 
promised to them the coming of the Holy Ghost. 
The evidence in favor of the second part of the prop- 
osition is found in the logical argument that God 
must have intended unity in the Church as a perfect 
society in order to preserve the unity of the faith, 
and that such unity is impossible without an abso- 
lute, infallible head. As Leo XHL says in the En- 
cyclical last above cited : '' Indeed, no true and per- 
fect society can be conceived which is not governed 
by some supreme authority. Christ, therefore, must 
have given to His Church a supreme authorit}^ to 
which all Christians must render obedience. For 
this reason, as the unity of the faith is of necessity 
required for the unity of the Church, unity of gov- 
ernment is necessary, jure divino. But since He 
willed that His Kingdom should be visible, He was 
obliged, when' He ascended into Heaven, to desig- 
nate a Vice-Regent on earth." 

This argument is almost a literal translation of the 



1^6 

following passage from St. Thomas Aquinas in his 
Contra Gentiles (Lib. IV., c. yd), which chapter Leo 
XIII. also cites immediately afterwards : 

'' To the unity of the Church it is requisite that all 
the faithful should agree as to the faith. But con- 
cerning those things which are of faith, it will hap- 
pen that questions will be raised ; but by differences 
of opinion the Church is divided, unless it is pre- 
served in unity by the opinion of one. Therefore it 
is necessary for preserving the unity of the Church 
that there should be one to preside over the Church. 
But it is manifest that Christ does not fail to provide 
necessaries for his Church. ... It is, therefore, 
not to be doubted that one presides over the whole 
Church by the ordination of Christ." 

It is submitted that a study of the Summa shows 
that St. Thomas Aquinas believed the philosophical 
system of Aristotle to be correct, that men consisted 
only of body and the intellectual soul, and adapted 
the teachings of Christianity to it, merely substitut- 
ing for public opinion, or for the opinion of the most 
eminent men, which was Aristotle's arbiter of right 
and wrong, the opinion of the most eminent of the 
Apostles, St. Peter, and his successors in office, 
v/hich was to enlighten and guide all intellects. 

It is true that in the writings of St. Thomas are 
to be found passages which refer to the action of 
angels and of the Holy Ghost on the minds of men ; 
but these remnants of the older and purer theology 
are absolutely incompatible with the Aristotelian 
theory of body and soul. This appeared in the con- 
test which occurred within the Roman Catholic 



137 

Church in the last ccntixr}^ over Jansenism, and 
which is so eloquently described in the Provincial 
Letters of Pascal. The contest ended in the utter 
discomfiture of the Anti-aristotelians, and the accept- 
ance of the Jesuit theory that all men are born with 
sufficient grace, and hence logically need no help 
from the Holy Ghost. 

By the declaration of the papal infallibility in all 
questions of morals, this system has been completed ; 
for, as shown above in the first chapter, the word 
" morals " includes all human intentional acts. As 
St. Thomas says in Summa, L, II., q. i, a. 3 : '' Moral 
acts and human acts are the same." What human 
acts of the slightest importance can there be for 
which an infallible rule cannot be obtained from 
Rome ? What need is there, then, of a Holy Ghost ? 

In the Encyclical concerning the principal duties 
of Christian citizens, dated January 10, 1890 (Leonis 
Papae XIII. Allocutiones, Vol. IV., p. 15), His Holi- 
ness demands '' wills perfectly subject and obedient 
. . . to the Roman Pontiff as to God." 

In a letter to Cardinal Nina, Pontifical Secretary 
of State, dated August 27, 1878 (Leonis Papae Allo- 
cutiones, Vol. I., p. 39), he claims to be ''the Master 
of the faith and the Ruler of the consciences " of all 
Catholics. Justin McCarthy in his Leo XIII. (p. 89) 
calls him '' the ruler over consciences." 

The logical consequence of this Roma.i Catholic 
teaching is the rule of the Jesuits, in their Constitu- 
tions (VI., i): ''Let every one believe firmly that 
those who live under obedience should let them- 
selves be guided and governed by their superiors 



138 

exactly as though they were corpses which let them- 
selves be turned in every direction and treated in 
any manner ; or like the stafif in the hands of an aged 
man, which serves him who holds it in his hand for 
all purposes and in all purposes." 

Among the general public this doctrine has been 
inculcated under the guise of '' probabalism " which 
allows a man to act in accordance with the sayings 
or writings of some one in authority, disregarding 
the promptings of his conscience ; for the general 
public, one author of '' exceptional authority " will 
do — even if the act be with fear of one's conscience 
that the opposite course is correct ; see Gury*s 
Compendium of Moral Theology, I., p. 36, cap. 4 De 
Consc. Prob. 

The practical elimination of the Third Person of 
the Blessed Trinity from popular modern Roman 
Catholic Theology, which necessarily follows this 
denial of conscience, is therefore not to be wondered 
at. In the City of Rome, with its hundreds of 
Churches, not one is dedicated to the Holy Ghost. 

As Mgr. Talbot, private chamberlain of Pius IX., 
writes to Cardinal Manning in '' Life of Cardinal 
Manning '' (Vol. II., p. 155, note) : 

'* What a beautiful sermon Father Faber preached 
on the Feast of Pentecost ! I read it with great inter- 
est, and I have had it translated into Italian, as I think 
it quite as applicable to the Romans and Italians 
as it is to the English. Really, one of the great 
characteristics of the age is to ignore the existence 
of the Holy Ghost in the Church." 

To one acquainted with Cardinal Manning's 



139 

strong devotion to the Holy Ghost, his constant 
contest with the Jesuit faction of the Roman Catholic 
Church, so often mentioned in his '' Life," was a 
foregone conclusion. In all the voluminous writings 
of Leo XIIL, the author does not recollect seeing 
more than one or two references to the Holy Ghost, 
except in formal invocations of the Blessed Trinity, 
or where he is shown as speaking to the Apostles or 
their successors ; certainly there is no recognition of 
the Holy Spirit as a teacher of all Christians, speak- 
ing directly to the souls of men. 

In the Encyclical De vita sancta instituenda 
(Leonis Papse XIIL Allocutiones, Vol. III., p. 190), 
there is no mention of the Third Person of the 
Blessed Trinity as influencing man's spirit. 

The burning question during the early Reformation 
was whether laymen should be allowed to sit in the 
Council, which all agreed should be called, for the 
reformation of morals ; Pope Paul IV., in his com- 
munication to Charles V., asserted that the guidance 
of the Holy Spirit had been promised only to the 
clergy (Froude's Council of Trent, p. 125). 

Does this Roman Catholic condition not suggest 
the state of mind of the men at Ephesus, referred to 
by St. Paul in the nineteenth chapter of Acts, who 
said : '' We have not so much as heard whether 
there be any Holy Ghost." Might it not even be 
that this is the '' sin against the Holy Ghost "? 

This is still the real battleground between Protest- 
ants and Roman Catholics. 

The answer to this Roman Catholic thvv:;ry 
is of course that according to the New Testa- 



I40 

ment, especially the Acts and Epistles, there is over- 
whelming evidence of the mission of the Holy Ghost 
to the individual consciences of all Christians, with 
ample power to guide them to all truth, so far as 
they avail themselves of the means of grace. 

This theory disregards utterly such texts as the 
two following : i Cor., 6, 19. '' What ? know ye not 
that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost 
which is in you, which ye have of God and ye are 
not your own? " 

I Cor., 3, 16. 

'' Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and 
that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you ? '' 

It substitutes for the divine guidance of the Spirit, 
a blind obedience to others and an utter failure to 
develop our inborn tendencies to act honestly, 
benevolently, etc., of our own accord, even in cases 
where no rule has been laid down for us by 
authority ; it teaches us that such a development 
is impossible, because there is no such thing in us 
as a spirit or conscience, in the true sense of the 
word, to develop. 

It is submitted moreover that this system of 
dichotomy crushes the most important part of a 
man's personality, that it dries up and destroys 
that very part of his nature to develop which 
Christ came to earth, that it strikes at the very root 
of all independent healthy development of character. 

As Fairbairn says in his ^^ Morality '' : 

'' Religious education must educe and bring into 
conscious operation the perception of truth and the 
practice of truth. The soul must know the truth by 
its owa operations and it must learn to abhor false- 



141 

hood and hypocrisy. It does not educe and bring 
into operation the moral powers by merely putting 
into the mind a knowledge of what truth is. Chris- 
tian education brings into operation the conscience. 
. . . . This is where Christian education may 
exercise its functions in bringing into operation the 
higher parts of our nature, and in making them the 
rulers and guides of human action. It is thus that 
benevolence, justice, truth, purity and order become 
the characteristic virtues of life.'* See also "^ Lux 
Mundi *' (page 396) and Richmond's '^ Christian 
Economics " (page 7). 

Nor does this destruction of conscience as an inde- 
pendent power within us affect only our ideas of right 
and wrong ; it tears up the roots from which spring 
all our most beautiful ideals which we long to express 
in art ; it deprives us of that discontent and enter- 
prise, the mother of invention, which is ever driv- 
ing the individual to improve his condition, to do his 
duty in that state of life in which it has pleased God 
to call him, better and more expeditiously, and thus 
creates one main difference between progressive na- 
tions and those which remain waiting patiently until 
some one from above shall teach them what to do. 

The importance of the cultivation of this spiritual 
faculty, even from a mere worldly point of view, 
is well shown in Hudson's "^ Laws of Ps)^chic 
Phenomena,'' where the power of this part of man 
over the physical world is fully described. 

The neighboring races of French Canadians and 
New England Protestants are good examples of the 
practical effects of these doctrines ; committees of 



142 

priests have recently been appointed to teach the 
'' Habitans " of Canada some of the modern improve- 
ments in agriculture. 

A characteristic story was related by the author's 
father, who was educated at the Jesuit College in 
Montreal : one da}^ in replying to a question put by 
the priest, he gave the answer as it appeared in 
the book, and then continued, '' therefore so-and-so 
is so-and-so ** ; the priest immediately interrupted 
him with the words : '' See that boy who says 
* therefore ' ! What has he to do with ^ therefore ' ? 
Let him answer the question as it stands in the book 
and nothing more ! '* 

May not a Roman Catholic country be called a 
land where there is for laymen no ^' therefore ** ? 

As William Arthur says in his '' Popes, Kings 
and People " (p. 458): 

'' But when men have once really believed in a God 
who leaves the rule over His redeemed offspring to 
a vicar, and have believed in man as a creature 
whose conscience another man is to keep, it is hard 
to find in them foothold for Christian convictions. 
They are kneaded to the hand of the priest.'* 

How subservient to papal authority individuals 
become even in the United States, and even among a 
class generally so independent as newspaper editors, 
may be shown by the following extract which 
appeared in the daily press, from an address to the 
Pope recently forwarded through Cardinal SatoUi : 
^'To His Holiness Pope Leo XIIL : 

Most Holy Father — Prostrate at the feet of Your 
Holiness we, the editors of the Catholic Press of the 



H3 

United States of America, taking the occasion of the 
presence of your Apostolic Delegate whose resi- 
dence we regard as a special mark of your favor, beg 
to present through him, the expression of our filial 
devotion and steadfast loyalty to the person and pol- 
icy of the Sovereign Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ 
upon earth, and at the same time profess ourselves 
filled with a determination, not only to vindicate the 
inalienable rights of the See of Peter, but to advance, 
as far as in us lies, the welfare ot the Holy Church 
in the United States." 

But even these editors ^' prostrate at the feet of 
Your Holiness " are apparently not subservient 
enough to suit the Plierarchy of this country, for 
two days after the editors had determined on this 
address, the Archbishops published the following 
proclamation : ^^ And lest the present evil, a daily 
growing source of scandal to Catholics and others, 
should continue to flourish, we judge well to meet 
it, not by cautions and advices merely, but also by 
ecclesiastical penalties. Wherefore, for the future, 
laymen or clerics who through themselves or 
throug'h others, associated or encouraged by them, 
in public print assail by wanton words, ill-natured 
utterance, railleries, those in authority, much more if 
they presume to carp at or condemn a bishop's 
method of administration, all those, principals, part- 
ners, and abettors, disturbers, contemners, and ene- 
mies of the ecclesiastical discipline, as they are, we 
declare guilty of gravest scandal, and thereby, their 
fault being proved, deserving of censure.'* 

For practical effect in charitable work compare 



144 

the Teachings on the Mount or the spirit which 
breathes in the Epistles of the New Testament or in 
the Ante-Nicene Fathers with the cold and elaborate 
dissertations of St. Thomas Aquinas, on Morality, 
balancing one excess against the other, in very much 
the same language which Aristotle had used three 
hundred years before Christ's coming ! 

The Ethics as the work of the heathen Aristotle is 
doubtless much to be admired ; he knew of no con- 
science, speaking with authority from the Holy 
Ghost ; the best ethical rule he could imagine (Book 
11. , Chapter 9) was the opinion of those among man- 
kind who are most honored by their fellows ; his 
highest ideal (Book X,, Chapter 8) was a selfish- 
ness consisting in the gratification not of the senses, 
but of the intellect, attainable by a few at the expense 
of the toil and degradation of the many. His 
exaltation of the contemplative life, undisturbed 
by em^otions whether right or wrong, above the life 
of action as being more continuous, more inde- 
pendent, more reposeful, more final, is evidently an 
echo of the Nirvana doctrine of the Buddhists of 
India, brought back by the army of Alexander. St. 
Thomas says in Summa, L, II., q. 3, a. 5 : '' Happi- 
ness consists more in the work of the speculative 
than of the practical intellect " ; and again he says 
in Summa I., II., q. 3, a. 8 : '' The last and perfect 
happiness cannot be, except in the contemplation of 
the divine essence.'' 

In comparing the active and contemplative life, 
the difference is stated in question three, article five 
(above cited), as follows : '' In conternplative life, man 



145 

communicates with his superiors, that is with God 
and the angels, with whom by happiness he is 
assimilated ; but in those things which pertain to 
active life, even other animals have something in 
common with man, although imperfectly." 

This conclusion, which is reached only after an 
elaborate consideration of all the various human 
capacities, is the same as that of Aristotle who, in 
his Ethics (Book X., Chapter 8) says : '' It follows 
that the activity of God being preeminently blissful 
will be speculative, and if so then the human activity 
which is most nearly related to it, will be most cap- 
able of happiness. We conclude then that happiness 
is co-extensive with speculation." 

The teaching of Aristotle and St. Thomas, by 
which the life of contemplation is exalted above 
the life of action, is certainly largely responsible for 
the state of facts which Cardinal Manning laments 
in his " Life " (Vol. IL, p. 781) : '' And further all the 
great works of charity in England have had their 
beginning out of the (Roman Catholic) Church — for 
instance, the abolition of the slave trade and slavery ; 
and the persevering protest of the Anti-Slavery 
Society. Not a Catholic name, so far as I know, 
shared in this. France, Portugal and Brazil have 
been secretly, or openly, slave trading, or, till now, 
even, slave-holding. The whole temperance move- 
ment — it was a Quaker that made F. Mathew a 
total abstainer. Catholic Ireland and the Catholics 
of England, until now, have done little for temper^ 
ance. The Anglican and dissenting ministers are far 
more numerously total abstainers than our priests. 



I4S 

The Act of Parliament to protect animals frora 
cruelty was carried by a non-Catholic Irishman ; the 
Anti-Vivisection Act also. Both are derided, to my 
knowledge, among Catholics. The acts to protect 
children from cruelty were the work of Dissenters* 
On these three societies there is hardly a Catholic 
name ; on the last, mine was for long the only one. 
So again in the uprising against the horrible de- 
pravity which destroys young girls — multitudes of 
ours — I was literally denounced by Catholics ; not 
one came forward. If it was ill done, why did no- 
body try to mend it ? I might go on. There are 
endless Avorks for the protection of shop assistants, 
overworked railway and train men, women and 
children ground down by sweaters, and driven by 
starvation wages upon the streets. Not one of the 
works in their behalf was started by us, hardly a 
Catholic name is to be found on their reports. Surely 
we are in the Sacristy. It is not that our Catholics 
deliberately refuse, but partly they do not take the 
pains to know, partly they are prejudiced. *Can 
any good thing come out of Nazareth ? ' Partly they 
are suspicious ; ' who knows it is not a proselytising 
affair ? ' And finally they live on easily, unconscious 
that Lazarus lies at their gate full of sores.** The 
predecessor of Cardinal Manning, Cardinal Wise- 
man, had made a complaint in the same spirit against 
the Monastic Orders for their lack of participation 
in strictly spiritual work among the poor (Life of 
Cardinal Manning, Vol. II., p. 4) : '' Now look at 
the position in which I am. Having believed, having 
preached, having assured bishops and clergy, that 



147 

in no great city could the salvation of multitudes be 
carried out by the limited parochial clergy, but that 
religious communities alone can and will undertake 
the huge work of converting and preserving the 
corrupted masses. I have acted on this conviction. 
I have introduced, or greatly encouraged, the estab- 
lishment of five religious congregations in my diocese ; 
and I am just (for the great work) where I first 
began ! Not one of them can (for it cannot be want 
of will) undertake it. It comes within the purpose 
of none of them to try. Souls are perishing around 
them, but they are prevented by their Rules, given 
by Saints, from helping to save them, at least in any 
but a particular and definite way. . . . Almost every 
religious community has no end of dispensations, 
some from fasting and abstinence, some from choir, 
all from the habit, some have female servants, etc , 
etc. If you ask them why all these exceptions, you 
are told the circumstances of the country require 
them. But who thinks of recurring to the same 
dispensing power of the Holy See for exemption 
and liberation from provisions as much intended for 
different countries as these, from restrictions on the 
power of doing good in the way that the country 
requires it ? *' 

The ethics of the Jesuits, so severely criticised, for 
example in Pascal's '' Provincial Letters,'' or Bun- 
sen's '' Zeichen der Zeit," find ample authority in 
Aristotle, if not in the New Testament. Cardinal 
Gibbons in a public letter, containing a threat that 
Roman Catholics would leave one political party 
(published in the Catholic Review of May 23, 1896), 



148 

declares : '' Patience is a virtue, but it is not the 
only virtue ; when pushed too far it may degenerate 
into pusilanimity." It is submitted that His Emi- 
nence would find difficulty in citing a text of the 
Sermon on the Mount in support of this principle, 
that patience has its limits — but he Avould find 
numerous authorities to that effect in the writings 
of the Prince of Philosophers ; as for example in his 
'' Ethics," Book IV., Chapter 5 : ''It is like a slave to 
endure insults offered to one's self." As Father 
Harper declares in his Metaphysics of the School 
(Introduction, p. LXXIL): ''His (St. Thomas 
Aquinas') m.oral Theology — to repeat what I have 
said before — is built upon the Ethics of the great 
Stagyrite." 

Is it then to be wondered at that the Jesuits, be- 
lieving that there is in man no divine spiritual part 
which, at the touch of the Holy Ghost, is ready to 
flame heavenward, should build all their churches, 
not in Gothic architecture in which the spirit is ever 
striving upward to throw off the weight of inert 
matter, but in the Grecian style, expressive of pagan 
contentment with the earthly, sensual beauty of this 
world, and that, in accordance with the same taste, 
every piece of Christian Gothic architecture has been 
eliminated from modern Rome ? 

The answer of Christianity to Aristotelianism is 
therefore also its answer to the Roman Catholic 
Scholasticism. 

To any one familiar w^th the writings of the 
Aquinate the following extract from " Aristote- 
lianism," by Rev. I. Gregory- Smith might be sup- 
posed to be written with reference to St. Thomas ; 



149 

(P. 28). '' There is not indeed the unhesitating and 
unequivocal enunciation of self-knowledge, self- 
acquittal, self-condemnation, which is the inheritance 
of Christian ethics. 

" The word (conscience), which the New Testament 
has made familiar for this moral introspection, is not 
in Aristotle. As we have seen, he makes the reason 
the judge, presiding over this court ever in session 
within the man, rather than the advocate laying his 
case before the will, whose verdict is final. Above 
all, apart from any deficiencies in the character of 
the morality, which it inculcates, the great defect in 
the Aristotelian conception of conscience is the want 
of authority. Conscience with Aristotle is not the 
voice of God. So long as conscience is supported 
by no sanction higher than man himself can give, so 
long as conscience can appeal only to the general 
consent of mankind, to the intelligent approval of 
those who are esteemed above their fellows, to the 
legislative enactments of the State, to considerations, 
however obvious of expediency, conscience cannot 
dictate, can only expostulate and remonstrate, often 
like Cassandra, in vain. Without a sanction more 
permanent, more comprehensive, more unquestion- 
ably obligatory than human enforcements, singly or 
collectively, can supply, conscience cannot claim 
obedience as a due, which must be rendered, come 
what may." 

(P. 46). '' Virtue is instrumental in regulating the 
passions, which would otherwise frustrate the pursuit 
of happiness by their infatuation. Be good that ye 
may be happy is the key-note of his philosophy. 



150 

Self is the center of his system ; regard for self shapes 
and colors it from first to last. The ' Ethics ' are 
Aristotle's answer to the question, ' How is man to be 
happy ? ' 

" It is a lofty selfishness. There is nothing sordid, 
nothing gross about it. It marks, as by a highwater 
line, how high ideal selfishness can be raised. But it 
is genuine unalloyed selfishness, and this lies at the 
very core of the philosoph3^ ... It is, in a word, 
the unruffled serenity, inseparable from virtue. 
Where could there be a more beautiful ideal of life, 
if the culture of self, the beautification of self, were 
all in all ? Even v/hen, leaving sublunary things, 
Aristotle soars upv/ards into the life contemplative, 
self clings to him. He places contemplation above 
action as more continuous, more independent, m_ore 
reposeful, more final. . . . Emotion disturbs it. 
Therefore emotions rightly directed or not, m.ust be 
hushed into absolute stillness. This is a glorious 
ideal, so far as it represents the supremacy of reason 
over passion. But it is a selfish glory after all ; even 
as the devout raptures of the monk in his cell are 
selfish, so far as they are purchased by the soldier's 
abandonment of his post in the turmoil and peril ot 
life. The contemplative life is a refined selfishness, 
the selfish enjoyment of a transcendental bliss incom- 
municable to mankind generally. The happiness 
which Aristotle proposes as the end of being is not 
something which all have a title to share in ; it is the 
privilege of a few. He rejects the hedonism or utili- 
tarianism of the vulgar, only to substitute the same 
thing in disguise." 



Another doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, derived 
as usual from Aristotle, which has helped greatly 
to destroy individual initiative in Roman Catholic 
countries is that all movement comes from above, 
and, therefore, above everj^thing moved must stand 
one who moves it, God alone is not moved by any 
one. (De Regimine Principum, Lib. III., cap. i to 
3, and Contra Gentiles, Lib. L, cap. 13). 

The connection of this doctrine with astrology 
will be shown in the last chapter. 

A further Aristotelian teaching which St. Thomas 
adopted and v/hich has had a most far-reaching con- 
sequence is that of the ^^ Final Cause," from which 
every action must be judged. Thus he says in 
Summa L, IL, q. i, a. 3: '' According as the end is 
praiseworthy or to be blamed, our works should be 
praised or blamed," and id. q. 18, a. 4 : '' Human ac- 
tions depend from their ends . . . from their ends 
they take the quality of good or evil . . . whose 
end is good, he is good, and whose end is bad, he is 
bad." The notorious use which the Jesuits have 
made of this principle by claiming that their organi- 
zation had the very highest end and justified any 
action, need not here be commented on. To quote 
again Mgr. Talbot (Life of Cardinal Manning, II., p. 
388) : '' The motto of the Jesuits ought to be changed 
from ad majorem Dei gloriam to ad majorem Socie- 
tatis gloriam." 

This doctrine, that the end justifies the means, for 
which the Jesuits have been most strongly blamed 
and which even they have feared to defend, is one 
of the foundation stones of the philosophy of him 



152 

who, by the Paladin of the Jesuits, has been declared 
the Patron of all Roman Catholic schools and col- 
leges. 

Moreover, this theory of dichotomy strikes at the 
root of the importance of the Lord's Supper ; if we 
adopt the theory of transubstantiation, we must first 
believe that our Lord, in common with all men, 
possessed a substantial form which takes the place 
of the substantial form of the bread in the Blessed 
Sacrament ; but if all men possess a substantial form, 
i, e., a reasoning soul, which, together with the 
physical body, constitutes the individual, it follows 
that the body of our Lord must feed and nourish 
either this reasoning soul (or intellect) or the body of 
the communicant. Now it is generally agreed that 
it does neither. What permanent benefit can then 
be derived by the participant in a Mass ? If man, on 
the other hand, has a spiritual, as well as an in- 
tellectual and physical part to his nature, the whole 
divine mystery becomes as intelligible as we mortals 
need expect ; Christ is spiritually taken and received 
b}^ the faithful in the Lord's Supper, to the renewal 
and regeneration of their spirits. 

Another closely related evil of scholastic theology 
may be mentioned here : the minimizing of the human 
element in our Saviour. Aquinas on this point 
followed the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius the 
Areopagite, v/ith his Neo-Platonic teachings, with 
Saints to satisfy man's craving for a human mediator. 
This is fully set out in Canon Gore's ^' Dissertations 
on Subjects connected with the Incarnation" (p. 
206). 



153 

Leo XIII. closes his Erxcyclicals with appeals to 
the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and other Saints for in- 
tercession with God, — but he rarely, if ever, appeals 
Christ as the Great Intercessor, although we have 
His express promise that whatsoever we should ask 
in His name we shall receive. (Gospel of St. John 
XVI., 24.) 

Need we v/ onder that in a religion which recog- 
nizes in man only a rational soul, (as it does in plants 
a vegetable soul and in animals a sensitive soul,) the 
divine lineaments of the Saviour are fading away, as 
it were, in a dissolving view, to be replaced by the 
sharp, cold features of *^ the Philosopher," and that 
the Holy Spirit comes only — as was said at the Coun- 
cil of Trent — in the mail-bags from the Vatican, and 
that even the worship of God the Father is being re- 
duced to a faint Deism by the hero-worship of a 
crowd of dei minores ? What chance has the patient 
when the physician not only ignores the only possible 
remedy but even denies the existence of the one 
organ through which the remedy could be taken 
into the system ? 

Why should we be surprised at the slow progress 
of Christianity under Roman Catholic guidance any 
more than we should wonder at the slow progress of 
an ocean steamship, whose captain was ignorant of, or 
denied the existence of the great engine beneath his 
deck, and insisted on propelling his ship only by the 
methods and rules, in vogue three hundred years 
before the Day of Pentecost ? 

The Church herself, through the exaltation of 
reason and the degradation of conscience, has raised 



154 

that might}' brood of Rationalists or Naturalists, such 
as Grotius, Kobbes, Puffendorf and Rousseau, who 
now threaten to devour her ; see the chapter on the 
history of the Social Contract Theory, in the author's 
*' Trade Organizations in Politics." 

Was it not natural that when the forged bands of 
the False Decretals, which bound St. Thomas, and, 
as he thought, all human reason to the Chair of St. 
Peter, were proven by history to be but shams and 
illusions that man should fall back to the position 
of Aristotle, with reason, deprived of all divine aid, 
as his only guide ? 

In vain would the Church hand over all such 
Naturalists or Rationalists '' to the secular arm " ! 
There is but one remedy : Let it assist in replacing 
conscience on the throne of human nature, but pros- 
trate^ with imploring arms, vrithout any human inter- 
mediary, at the foot-stool of God, the Holy Ghost. 

As Maurice says in '' The Conscience," p. 83 : 

'' There is that in me which asks for the Right, for 
that vv^hich ought to have dominion over me ; there 
is that in me v.'hich says emphatically, ' This is not 
that Right, this ought not to have dominion over 
me ! ' I may be long in learning what the Right is ; 
I may make a thousand confused efforts to grasp it ; 
I may trj' to make it for myself; I may let others 
make it for me. But always there will be a witness 
in me that what I have made or anyone has m.ade, 
is not what I ought to serve ; that is not the right, 
not what I am seeking for, not what is seeking me.'* 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 

Leo XITL, in his Encyclical on St. Thomas 
Aquinas, above cited, declares : '' So, too, the phys- 
ical sciences, so much in vogue now, and which by 
their ingeniously contrived inventions have every- 
where excited so much merited attention, will have 
not only nothing to lose, but much to gain by the 
restoration of the ancient philosophy. For in their 
use and improvement, the mere consideration of 
facts and study of nature is not enough ; but after 
the facts are established, it is needful to go a step 
higher, and sedulously employ every means in find- 
ing out the nature of corporeal things, investigating 
the laws and principles by v/hich they are governed, 
and by tracing up their system, their unity and va- 
riety, and their mutual affinity in diversity. To all 
these investigations scholastic philosophy, if handled 
with skillfulness, will bring power and light and em- 
pire — we most earnestly beseech you, venerable 
brethren, to restore and extend far and wide the 

golden wisdom of St. Thomas for the 

improvement of all the sciences." 

What is ''the golden wisdom " of St. Thomas as to 
the physical world ? 

The importance of this question will at once be rec- 
ognized when we remember that one merit of schol- 
astic philosophy which no one can dispute, is the 

^55 



156 

logical unity and consistency with which it proceeds 
from the most fundamental principles of metaphysics 
to the most practical acts of every day life ; and 
moreover that one of the most important teachings of 
the Roman Church, the doctrine of transubstantia- 
tion, is bound up with and depends upon its well 
defined, closely argued theory of the physical world. 

It is submitted that the so-called science of astrol- 
ogy formed an essential part of the theory of St. 
Thomas, as to the constitution of the physical world, 
and that with the elimination of that belief the main- 
spring of his entire cosmic theory was rem.oved and 
the fragmentary remains of the system are unintelli- 
gible, and tend only to clog the progress of true 
science. 

To prove this assertion it is necessary only to con- 
sider the following citations from the second largest 
work of St. Thomas, known as the Contra Gentiles 
or Summa Philosophica, in v\rhichthe Angelic Doctor 
sets forth his philosophical system, as he did after- 
wards his theology in the Summa Theologiae. 

In brief, foUov/ing Aristotle, his theory is that 
everything in the world, except to a certain extent 
the soul of man, receives its original motive power 
{i. t.y its substantial form), by which it exists as such 
or such a being, from the stars, and that each of the 
stars is in turn guided by an intelligent spirit (not 
an angel) ; so that the whole creation is a hierarchy 
working together for the glory of God. It follows 
that if this motive power from the stars does not 
exist, the whole system falls to pieces, and the terms 
such as •" substance " and '' accident '' are as useless 



157 

and worthless as the wheels and levers of a perpetual 
motion machine ; a chain is no stronger than its 
weakest link ! 

St. Thomas could as little imagine the physical 
world without this hierarchical system as he could 
imagine the Church with an organization as simple 
as that of the Society of Friends, or the State, as a 
democracy with universal suffrage ; and to endeavor, 
therefore, to force modern science to adapt itself to 
the terms and requirements of scholastic philosophy 
is as sensible as it would be to educate the future 
citizens of a republic, with universal suffrage, on the 
precepts of some writer on Feudal Law. 

In fact, the fall of the Feudal System as well as 
that of the hierarchical mediaeval Church is closely 
connected with the discrediting of astrology ; it is, 
therefore, easy to understand the hate of the Church 
against Galileo, and how Descartes trembled at pub- 
lishing his theories of the heavenly bodies even as an 
hypothesis. Only when this baneful influence was 
removed, could a man stand up and say : *' Cogito, 
ergo sum.*' 

The following quotations from the third book of 
St. Thomas's Contra Gentiles will, it is believed, 
justify the foregoing assertions, even to persons 
who have not made a study of scholasticism, and to 
whom, therefore, many of the terms will seem 
strange. The quotations are given somewhat in full 
because the book "• Contra Gentiles '* is not generally 
attainable. 

Chapter XXII. : '' The celestial bodies truly move 
and are moved, , . . in so far as they move by moving, 



the object of their movement is to obtain a likeness 
to Deity, in that they are the cause of other objects. 
But they are the cause of other objects by this, that 
they cause the coming into existence and cessation 
of existence, and other movements in these inferior 
objects. The movements of heavenly bodies, there- 
fore, so far as they move is intended for the coming 
into existence and the cessation of existence, which 
is in those inferior objects. . . . But in the same way 
the heavenly bodies although they are more worthy 
than the inferior bodies, yet do not intend to bring 
the latter into existence and to give them forms as 
an ultimate end ; but in this they (the heavenly 
bodies) aim at an ultimate end in that they are the 
cause of others. . . . 

'' If, therefore, the movement of heaven itself is in- 
tended for the purpose of bringing things into ex- 
istence, but the existence of all things is intended for 
man as the ultimate end, it is plain that the move- 
ment of the heaven is intended to have man for its 
object and as the ultimate end of things that are 
generated and moved. 

'' Hence it is said that God made celestial bodies for 
the service of all races (Deut. 4-19)." 

Chapter XXIII. — '' From the foregoing also it can 
be shown that the first movement of heaven is intel- 
lectual, for nothing acting according to its own 
species intends to produce a higher form than 
its own ; for everything which acts intends some- 
thing like itself. But a heavenly body, since it acts 
by its own movement, is intended for the highest 
form which is the human intellect : which indeed is 



159 

higher than any other form as appears from the fore- 
going(Chap. XXII.). A heavenly body therefore does 
not act for producing a body accordmg to its own 
species as a principal agent, but according to the 
species of some superior intellectual agent, to which 
the heavenly body bears itself as the instrument to 
the principal agent. But a heavenly body acts in 
bringing into existence as it is moved, therefore the 
heavenly body is moved by some intellectual sub- 
stance. Moreover, everything that is moved must 
be moved by something, as was proved above (Lib. I., 
Cap. XII.). A heavenly body therefore is moved by 
something. This other is either separated from it or 
united to it, so that the composite body is said to move 
itself, in so far as one part of it is moved and the 
other the mover. But if this latter is the case (since 
everything which moves itself is alive and animated) 
it follows that the heavenly body is alive and 
animated. But it can be animated by no soul except 
an intellectual one — it follows therefore that it is 
moved by an intellectual soul. But if it is moved by 
an external motor, the latter is either corporeal or 
incorporeal ; and if it is corporeal it does not move, 
unless it is moved, as appears from the foregoing 
(Lib. I., Cap. XIII.) ; it is necessary therefore that it 
should be moved by another ; but as one must not 
resort to the theory of an infinite number of bodies, 
one will and must come to a first incorporeal mover ^ 
but what is separated from a body nuist be intel 
lectual as is shown above (Lib. I., Cap. XLIV.). 
Therefore the movement of a heavenly body which 
is the first of bodies, is by an intellectual substance." 



i6o 

Chapter XXIV. — '' But if a heavenly body is 
moved by an intellectual substance, as has been shown 
(Chap. XXIII.), andthemovementof a heavenly body 
is intended to bring into existence inferior bodies, it 
follows that the coming into existence and move- 
ments of these inferior bodies proceeds from the in- 
tention of an intelligent substance. Therefore the 
forms and movements of inferior bodies are caused 
and intended by an intelligent substance as the prin- 
cipal agent, but by a heavenly body as the instru- 
ment. But it is necessary that the species of those 
that are caused and intended to exist by an intel- 
lectual agent, preexist in the intellect of that agent, 
as the forms created by artificers preexist in the 
intellect of the artificer and from them are brought 
into effect. Therefore all forms which are in these 
inferior bodies and all their movements are deter- 
mined by the intellectual forms which are in the 
intellect of one of these substances or of several of 
them. And on account of this Boetius says (De 
Trinit., C. 3) that the forms which are in matter comxC 
from forms that are without matter, and in so far, 
the statement of Plato is verified that separate forms 
are the origin of material forms, although he claims 
that they exist by themselves and immediately cause 
perceptible forms ; but we place them as existing in 
the intellect and causing inferior forms by the move- 
ment of the heaven. Since truly everything v^hich 
is moved by another per se and not by accident, is 
directed by it to the end of its movement, but a 
heavenly body is moved by an intellectual substance 
and causes by its movement all movements in these 



i6i 

inferior bodies, it is necessary that a celestial 
body is directed towards its end by an intellectual 
substance, and consequently inferior bodies are 
directed in the same way to their various ends. 

'' So therefore it is not difficult to see how natural 
bodies without sense are moved and act toward an 
end. For they tend to an end as directed by an 
intelligent substance, as an arrow tends to the mark 
directed by the archer ; for as an arrow follows its 
inclination to a mark or the end determined by the 
force of the archer, so natural bodies follow the 
inclination to natural ends from natural movers, from 
which proceed their forms and virtues and move- 
ments. Hence also it appears that every work of 
nature is the work of an intelligent substance ; for 
the principal effect is attributed to the first mover, 
directing toward an end rather than to the instru- 
ments by which he directs ; and on account of this 
the works of nature are found to proceed orderly to 
an end as the works of a wise man. It is plain there- 
fore that also those who lack sense can act for an 
end and seek a good by natural appetite and the 
divme likeness and its proper perfection — hence it 
appears that all things seek the divme likeness as 
their ultimate end." 

Chapter XXVIII. — ''All things are governed by 
God through the mediation of intellectual creatures. 
Since it pertains to divine Providence that order 
should be preserved in things, but a proper order is 
one which descends from the highest to the lowest 
proportionately, it is necessary that divmc Provi- 
dence should extend by some proportion even to the 



l62 

lowest things. But this proportion is that the high- 
est beings are under God and governed by him, so 
inferior creatures should be under higher ones and 
governed by them. But among all creatures the 
highest are the intellectual ones, as appears from the 
foregoing (Chap. XLIX.). The reason of divine 
Providence, therefore, demands that other creatures 

should be ruled by rational creatures 

Moreover, what exists by itself is the cause of that 
which exists by something els^. But only intel- 
lectual creatures operate by themselves, as if they 
were masters of their own acts by their free will ; 
but other creatures operate from the necessity of 
nature ; as if moved by another. Therefore intel- 
lectual creatures by their work are the movers and 
rulers of other creatures. 

Chapter LXXXII. — '' Inferior bodies are ruled by 
God through superior bodies. 

*' Since intellectual substances are superior and in- 
ferior, so also in corporeal substances. But intel- 
lectual substances are ruled by the superior ones, as 
the disposition of divine Providence descends pro- 
portionally even to the lowest, as shown above (Cap. 
LXX. et se^.). Therefore, by equal reason, inferior 
bodies are governed by superior bodies. 

" Moreover, so much as one body is higher in its 
place than another, so much more perfect is it found 
to be in its form ; for water is of better form than 
the earth, and air is of better form than water, and 
fire is of better form than air. But the heavenly 
bodies are in plaice higher than all the bodies. They 
are therefore of better form than all other bodies; 



i63 

therefore more active. Therefore they act on infe- 
rior bodies, and thus by them inferior bodies are ruled. 

'' Also what is in its nature perfect and without 
contradiction is of more universal virtue than that 
which in its nature does not exist without its con- 
trary But celestial bodies in their nature 

are without opposite qualities ; for they are not 
light nor heavy, nor hot nor cold; but inferior 
bodies are not completed in their nature without 
some contrary quality ; and this even their move- 
ment shows ; for in the circular movement of the 
heavenly bodies there is no opposite principle, hence 
there can be m them no violence ; but the move- 
ments of the lower bodies are in opposite directions, 
as the movement up or a movement down. There- 
fore heavenly bodies are of more universal virtue 
than lower bodies. But universal virtues are the 
movers of particular virtues, as appears from what 
has been said (Cap. LXX.). Therefore heavenly 
bodies move and govern lower bodies. 

'* Moreover, it was shown above (Cap. LXXVIII.) 
that all things are ruled by intellectual substances. 
But heavenly bodies more nearly resemble intellect- 
ual substances than other bodies, in so far as they 
are immutable ; they are also nearer to them, in that 
they are moved directly by them, as shown above 
(Lib. IL, Cap. LXX., et Lib. IIL, Cap. LXXX.). 
Therefore by them inferior bodies are ruled. . . . 

'' But heavenly bodies only among corporeal bodies 
are unchangeable, as is shown by their disposition, 
which is always found to be the same. The heav- 
enly body is therefore the cause of every change in 



164 

those things which change. But change in these 
inferior bodies is the beginning of all movement. 
. , . . It is, therefore, necessary that the heaven 
is the cause of all movement in these lov/er bodies. 

Chapter LXXXIV. — '' From the foregoing it ap- 
pears that in those things which concern the intel- 
lect, the heavenly bodies are not causes 

'' But it must be known that although the heavenly 
bodies cannpt be directly the causes of our intellect, 
yet they can indirectly affect it. For although the 
intellect is not a corporeal virtue, yet it cannot ful- 
fil its work in us without the cooperation of cor- 
poreal virtues, which are imagination and the power 
of memory and thought, as appears from the fore- 
going (chap. LXXIIL Lib. III.) ; and hence it is 
when the operation of these virtues are impeded on 
account of any indisposition of the body, the opera- 
tion of the intellect is also impeded, and on account of 
this also the goodness of the disposition of the body 
makes one apt to understand well . . . hence it is said 
in the second book De Anima (text, comm. 94) that 
* we see men with soft skin to have bright minds/ 
But the condition of the human body is subject to the 
heavenly movement . . . therefore indirectly heaven- 
ly bodies work for the goodness of the intellect ; and 
so as doctors can judge of the goodness of the in- 
tellect from the complexion of the body, as being its 
immediate cause, so the astrologer from the move- 
ments of the heavenly bodies can judge of the good- 
ness of the intellect as this movement is the remote 
cause of this goodness of the intellect. And by this 
way one can yerify what Ptolemy said in Centiloqu- 



ium : ' When Mercury shall have been at the time of 
birth of any one in any one of the houses of Saturn 
... he gives an intelligence apt to penetrate things 
even to the core/ " 

Chapter LXXX V. '' But from this it appears that 
heavenly bodies are not the causes of our wills or of 
our decisions . . . but yet it must be known that al- 
though the heavenly bodies are not the direct causes 
of our decisions, as if they worked directly on our 
wills, nevertheless indirectly from them some in- 
fluence is brought to bear on our decisions, from 
their influence on our bodies ; so when by the 
heavenly bodies the air is made intensely cold, we 
decide to warm ourselves at the fire or do something 
else which suits the season ; in another way, accord- 
ing as we are impressed by them there arise in us 
certain passions or we are made liable to certain 
passions, as choleric men are prone to anger ; or 
again when their influence on our bodies causes a 
certain disposition, we act accordingly, as when we 
are sick and consult a doctor ; moreover even human 
actions are caused by the heavenly bodies, as in so 
far as any one is deprived of reason and a lunatic and 
is moved by natural instinct as a brute. But it is 
plain that man resists these occasions or obeys them 
according to his reason ; but the greater number of 
men follow such natural impulses ; but few, tliat is 
only wise men, do not follow the occasion and 
natural impulses of acting badly. On account of 
this Ptolemy says in the Centiloquium that ' The 
wise soul helps the works of the stars ; ' and that 
^an astrologer could not give decisions according 



i66 

to the stars, unless he knows well the strength of 
the mind and complexion ; ' and that ' an astrologer 
should not say things specially but generally because 
while the impression of the stars produces its effect 
on most people because they do not resist the in- 
clination of their bodies, still it does not do so always 
in those who strongly resist the natural inclination 
by their reason.' " 

Chapter XCII. '* How a man is called fortunate 
and how he is helped by superior causes." . . . 

'* Since therefore a man is ordered according to 
his body under heavenly bodies, according to his 
intellect under angels, but according to his will under 
God, something can happen outside the intention of 
man but according to the order of the heavenly 
bodies, or the disposition of the angels or even of 
God. For although God only acts directly in the 
decision of man, yet the action of angels influences 
man in his decision by persuasion, and the action of 
the heavenly bodies by means of affecting his dispo- 
sition, as bodily impressions of the heavenly bodies 
on our bodies dispose men to certain elections. 
When, therefore, any one from the impressions of 
heavenly bodies and superior causes as above indi- 
cated is inclined to decisions useful to himself, whose 
use he does not recognize by his own reason, and 
when from the light of intellectual substances his in- 
tellect is illumined to understand them, and from the 
divine operation his will is inclined to choose some- 
thing useful to himself, the reason for which he is 
ignorant of, he is said to have good fortune ; and 
otherwise, he is said to have bad fortune when from 



16; 

superior causes his decision is inclined to the oppo- 
site, as it is said of one, ' Write that man sterile, a 
man who shall not prosper in his days/ Jer. 22, 30. 

'' , . . It is manifest that inanimate bodies 
acquire certain powers and virtues from the 
celestial bodies even besides those which they cer- 
tainly obtain from the celestial bodies as active 
and passive and elementary qualities ; so the power 
ol the magnet to attract iron comes from the 
virtue of a celestial body, and certain stones and 
herbs have other occult virtues. Hence nothing 
prevents that a certain man should have from the 
influence of a heavenly body, capacity for certain 
work which another has not, as a doctor in healing, 
a farmer in planting, a soldier in conquering." 

Further information concerning the ^^ intellectual 
substances" which guide the stars, showing that 
they are intelligent, incorruptible, and are endowed 
with free will, is found in the second book of the 
:same Summa Contra Gentiles. 

The whole doctrine is repeated concisely in the 
!Summa Theologias I., q. 115, a. 3, which is entitled : 
'' Whether celestial bodies are the causes of those 
things which here are done by inferior^bodies ? " The 
answer is that ''AH motion proceeds from the immov- 
;able. And, therefore, the more immovable things 
are, the more are they the cause of those things 
which are movable. But the heavenly bodies are 
amongst bodies the most immovable. For they are 
not moved except by a local motion (/. ^'., they are 
incorruptible). And, therefore, the movements of 
these lower bodies which are variable and multiform, 



i68 

are referred to the motion of the celestial body 
which is its cause. : . . Active principles are not 
found in these lower bodies, except the active qual- 
ities of the elements which are heat and cold and 
things of that kind ; and if it were so that the sub- 
stantial forms of lower bodies do not differ except by 
these accidents, it would not be necessar}'- to place 
above these lov/er bodies any active principle, but 
they would suffice for their action. But to those 
who consider things rightly, it appears that acci- 
dents of this kind are related as material dispositions 
to the substantial form of natural bodies. But matter 
does not suffice for action. And, therefore, above 
these material dispositions it is necessary to place 
some active principle. 

'^ Hence, the Platonists place separate species ac- 
cording to whose participation the lower bodies ac- 
quire substantial forms. But this does not appear to 
suffice. For separate species are always the same, 
since they are immovable. And so it would follow 
that there would be no variation in the generation 
and corruption of these lovver bodies. Which is 
evidently false. Hence, according to the philosopher 
(Aristotle) in H. De Generatione, it is necessary to 
place some active principle v/hich by its presence 
and absence causes the variation of generation and 
corruption in lower bodies. And of this kind are 
the celestial bodies, and, therefore, Avhatever in these 
lower bodies generates or produces one of its species, 
is, as it were, the instrument of a celestial body. As 
it^is said in H. Physic. (Aristotle) that man and the 
sun produces a man." 



169 

The foregoing quotations amply prove that ac- 
cording to St. Thomas, the force which in this world 
moves and generates everything, except the soul of 
man, comes from the intelligent spirits which guide 
the stars ; they create the substantial forms through 
which matter is differentiated into all the objects of 
the material world. The stars, therefore, furnish 
that without which the world cannot be imagined, 
and to strike it out of the system is to remove the 
motive power of the universe. 

Modern Roman Catholic writers try to hide this 
vital defect in their system by pretending that the 
forms themselves give life and motion to matter, but 
to St. Thomas this would have seemed as absurd as 
if one had said that the mold, instead of the artist 
made the statue. 

St. Thomas could imagine no forms, except as the 
expression of an intelligent being ; without the force 
from the stars the world would have seemed as dead 
as a steam engine would be if no steam existed. He 
seems expressly to deny the possibility that sub- 
stance could act by itself (Summa I., q. 54, a. i). 

It is true that neither matter nor accident are 
stated to be generated by the stars ; but the substan- 
tial form is the keystone in the arch, with matter on 
one side and accident on the other, so placed that 
neither of them can stand alone. As to matter, this 
could be proved by many citations; e.g., S. Thorn., 
q.4, depot, a. 3 : '' Matter cannot exist without form." 
As to the dependence of accident on substantial 
forms, the authorities are very numerous ; thus in 
Summa I., q. 29, a. i ad, 3; ''For accidents are the 
effects of substantial forms and show them forth." 



I/O 

The doctrine is summed up in Summa, L, q. 105, 
a. I.: '^Plants and mineral bodies resemble the sun 
and the stars, by whose virtue they are formed/* 

Leo XIII. in his Encyclical on Anglican Orders 
declares that it is the form which gives character to 
matter. 

Old Galileo in prison, with his failing eyesight, 
may well have congratulated himself that in de- 
stroying astrology he had done a work, worthy of 
a dying Samson's last revenge. 

Nor can this central pillar of their system, the force 
which created it, the forma substantialis, be replaced 
by anything else, nor can its absence be disregarded. 
The functions and powers of the spirits which guided 
the stars and created these astral bodies must be dis- 
posed of in some manner — either they can be returned 
to the Diety or they can be attributed to the Forms 
themselves ; if the former plan is adopted, and God 
is supposed to act directly upon matter, one falls 
into the occasionalism of Mallebranche, which the 
present reigning school of Jesuits has condemned 
more severely even than Protestantism; and if the 
latter plan is adopted, one builds up an unintelligible 
system dangerously near to a materialistic panthe- 
ism, in which the form is supposed to create itself and 
which, therefore, explains nothing. 

The latter theory is the one now in vogue in Jesuit 
schools, as illustrated by the following extracts from 
the Metaphysics of the School by Father Harper, 
S. J. (Macmillan & Co., 1884). So far as this system 
is at all intelligible, it seems to represent the sub- 
stantial form as emerging propria motu like a Jack-in- 



the-box, from imperceptible matter and then instan- 
taneously diving back into it again and thereby 
*' informing '* it and rendering it appreciable by the 
senses and endowing it with all its essential qualities. 
It is submitted that the following extracts show that 
the foregoing statement is not exaggerated. 

(Vol. IL, p. 563) ''But the Form according to 
its essential nature is the act of matter in such wise 
that, as the Angelic Doctor repeatedly monishes, it 
is not so much an entity itself, as that by which 
another entity (that is to say, the composite) is cons- 
tituted. It has no independent existence. By the 
mere fact that it is, it actuates or informs matter. 
It is educed out of the potentiality of matter ; and 
so educed that, for so long as it exists, it essentially 
exists as the Form of matter. But the actuation of 
matter and the constitution of the composite are 
really one and the same thing, considered from two 
different points of view.'' 

(Vol. II.5 p. 504.) '' For these reasons the Form 
is said to be educed out of the potentiality of the 
matter ; while the composite substance is said to be 
created, produced^ generated. Nevertheless the pro- 
ductive action is one and the same.'' 

(Vol. II., p. 386.) '' The Form, then, may be said 
to practically render it (matter) actual to sense." 

(Vol. II., p. 567.) ''The causality of the Form is 
not, strictly speaking, the union of the Form with 
the matter, but the actuation of the matter by the 
Form ; as will be shown in a later Thesis. Now 
this information virtually contains in its concept that 
the Form is educed out of the matter ; that it is 



172 

essentially dependent on the matter tor its first 
existence as well as for its continuance in being ; 
and, finally, that it is the act of matter. But these 
three elements equally connote the local presence of 
the Form with the matter, as an integral part or at 
least accompanying property of the formal causa- 
tion." 

(Vol. II., p. 503.) *' Now, to educe the Form out 
of the potentiality of matter is in every way indenti- 
cal with the actuation of matter. ... It needs 
no distinct unitive action to compound two entities 
that cannot be made to exist apart even by miracle. 

Therefore the eduction of the Form is the consti- 
tution of the substance." 

(Vol. II., p. 561.) '' It (this definition) is borrowed 
from Suarez. A substantial bodily Form, then, is a 
simple and incomplete substance which, as the act of 
matter, constitutes together with the matter the 
integral essence of the composite substance." 

(Vol. II., p. 520.) '' From a diversity of substantial 
Forms there follows a diversity of natural opera- 
tions." 

(Vol. III., p. 195.) ^'Substance can in a manner 
produce accidents, without any change in itself, by 
natural resultance ; and accidents in consequence 
can be the causes of accidents." 

How dangerously near to materialistic pantheism 
these theories lead is apparent. St. Thomas, who 
believed that the Forms were created and guided by 
immaterial spirits could use such quotations as the 
following in Contra Gentiles, Lib. III., Cap. XCVIL: 
*' Again : From the -diversity of Forms we gather 



173 

the reason of order in beings. For since the Form is 
that by which an entity has being and every entity, 
by 'reason of its having being, approaches to the like- 
ness of God who is His own simple Being ; it neces- 
sarily follows that the Form is no other than a parti- 
cipation of the Divine likeness in entities. Hence 
in unison with this conclusion, Aristotle, in the first 
Book of the Physics, speaking of Form declares that 
'it is something Divine and object of desire.' " 

But it means a very different thing when such 
passages are repeated with approval by a modern 
writer, such as Father Harper in his Metaphysics of 
the School, who believes no longer ein these star- 
guiding spirits, but only in Forms, continually im- 
mersed in matter, as the direct motive power of the 
world. If there is in every particle of matter, 
** something Divine and the object of desire," what 
is the difference between this teaching and materi- 
alistic pantheism ? Such passages as the following 
from Father Harper s volume H., p. 520, which could 
be multiplied indefinitely, certainly breathe such a 
spirit : 

'' Since then, there is an essential order in material 
substances ; the substantial Form, which is the 
intrinsic principle of the essential nature of each, and, 
in consequence, of the diversity, must likewise be 
the intrinsic principle of the cosmic order." 

Why blame Spinoza for Pantheism when he only 
identified Deity with all-containing matter? 

To find an answer to these theories, so lauded by 
Leo Xin., one must go back two centuries and take 
down the dusty folios which laughed scholasticism 



174 

into ''the modest retirement in the Italian and Iber- 
ian Peninsulas/' 

The answer to the theory last referred to is well 
given by Father Mallebranche, a devout believer in 
all the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church of 
that day, in his '' Search after Truth'* (Second Part, 
Book VI., Chap. III.): ''Philosophers not only 
speak without understanding themselves, when they 
explain the effects of nature by some beings of 
which they have no particular idea ; but also 
establish a principle whence very false and perni- 
cious consequences may directly be drawn. 

" For supposing with them that there are in bodies 
certain entities distinguished from matter, and hav- 
ing no distinct idea of those entities ; 'tis easie to 
imagine that they are the real or principal causes of 
the effects we see. And this is the very opinion of 
the vulgar philosophers. The prime reason of their 
supposing those substantial forms, real qualities, 
and such like entities is to explain the effects of 
nature : But when we come attentively to consider 
the idea we have of cause or power of acting, we 
cannot doubt but that it represents something di- 
vine : For the idea of a sovereign power is the 
idea of a sovereign divinity ; and the idea of a 
subordinate power, the idea of an inferiour divin- 
ity, yet a true divinity ; at least accord'ng to the 
opinion of the heathens, supposing it to be the idea 
of a true power or cause. And therefore we 
admit something divine in all the bodies that sur- 
round us, when we acknowledge forms, faculties, 
etc., that are capable of producing some effects by 



175 

the force of their nature ; and thus insensibly ap- 
prove of the sentiments of the heathens, by too 
great a deference for their philosophy. Faith in- 
deed corrects us ; but it may perhaps be said, that 
the mind is Pagan, whilst the heart is a Christian. 

'^ Moreover it is a hard matter to persuade our- 
selves that we ought neither to fear nor love true 
powers and beings, that can act upon us with some 
pain or reward us with some pleasure. And as love 
and fear are a true adoration, it is hard agam to 
imagine why they must not be adored. 

*^ There are some who affirm that the sub- 
stantial form produces forms ; and the accidental 
form, accidents. Others say that the forms produce 
both other forms and accidents. Others still, that 
bare accidents are not only capable of producing ac- 
cidents but even forms. But it must not be imagined 
that those, for instance, who say that accidents can 
produce forms by virtue of the form they are joined 
to, understand it the same way. For one part of them 
will have accidents to be the very force or virtue of 
the substantial form. Another that they imbibe into 
them the influence of the form and only act so by 
virtue of it, and a third, lastly, that will have them 
to be but instrumental causes." 

How closely the doctrine of ^' efficient cause " was 
bound up with that of the substantial form, so that 
they both must stand or fall together, appears from 
the following extract from Harper's Metaphysics 
of the School : 

(Vol. ni., p. 57.) ''The difficult question that is 
submitted to discussion and examination in this and 



176 

succeeding Theses, turns upon the nature of Efficient 
Causality — or rather upon the principiants of the 
Efficient Causality — by which the substantial form is 
educed out of the potentiality of matter and the 
composite substance generated/* 

(Vol. III., p. 224.) ''A property flows from the 
essence or substantial form, as its natural result. 
That agent, therefore, which is efficient cause of the 
existence of the essential nature, is ipso facto 
Efficient Cause of the property resulting from this 
essence. But the Efficient Cause of the essential 
nature is the generator, as is clear. Therefore, 
the generator is likewise Efficient Cause of the 
property/' 

Schopenhauer's criticism of Aristotle's '' causa 
efficiens,'' applies with equal force to the system of 
St. Thomas. 

On this theory too was based the Aquinate's 
famous idea of the ''second cause*' which is the very 
citadel of scholastic philosophy and theology, as 
being an attempt to explain predestination ; in the 
most celebrated passage (Summa, I., 11., q. 6, a. i) 
the argument on free-will is drawn from the analogy 
of the spirit guiding the stars. 

In answer to this theory, we need only cite 
Father Mallebranche in his '' Concerning the 
Search after Truth " (id.) : 

'' There are philosophers who maintain that 
second causes act by their matter, figure and mo- 
tion, and these in one sense are right enough. Others 
by their substantial form. Many by accidents or 
qualities, some by matter and form ; others by form 



177 

and accidents ; others still by certain virtues or 
faculties distinct from all this. . . . Nor can the 
philosophers compromise about the action whereby 
second causes produce their effects. For some of 
them pretend that causality ought not to be pro- 
duced, since it is this which produces. Others will 
that they truly act by their own action. But they 
are involved in so many labyrinths in explaining 
precisely wherein this action consists, and there are 
so many different opinions about it, that I cannot 
find in my heart to recite them." 

How little there would be left of Scholastic Philo- 
sophy if the doctrines of the Formal Cause and the 
Efficient Cause were eliminated, any one with the 
slightest acquaintance with Aristotelian or Scholas- 
tic Philosophy will know. 

Need we wonder that with such a philosophy as 
that of St. Thomas, Roman Catholics worship relics } 

The utter impossibility of understanding such 
modern works as '' The Physical System of St. 
Thomas,'* by Father Giovanni Maria Carnoldi, S. J., 
translated by Edward Heneage Bering (Benzinger 
Bros., New York), need not be marveled at when we 
remember that they dare not refer in any way to St. 
Thomas' belief in astrology, and that they are in 
effect trying to conceal this awful hiatus in their 
system — this skeleton in the closet. 

But none of these systems can be called that of 
St. Thomas ; his system was at least logical, if you 
granted the premises, i, ^., the influence of minds rul- 
ing the stars and through them the physical world ; 
see ''New Essays concerning Human Understand- 
ing," by Leibnitz (Macmillan & Co., p. 643). 

The whole theory of political and social rule, 



178 

government from above downward, was based upon 
this analogy ; in De Regimine Principum, liber. III., 
cap. IL, St. Thomas says : '' If there is order in cor- 
poreal movements, much more will there be in 
; spiritual matter. But as we see in bodies that the 
lower are moved by the higher and all are re. 
duced to the movement of the highest, which is 
the ninth sphere according to Ptolemy in i 
distinct Almagesti ; but according to Aristotle in 
2 de Caelo, it is the eighth .... which move- 
ment indeed blessed Dionysius in lib. de divinis 
Nominibus and de caelesti Hierarchia relates to us, 
distinguishing in spiritual substances movement as 
in bodies, that is circular, straight and oblique. 
Which movements indeed are certain illuminations 
which they receive from their superiors for action, 
as the same Doctor explains. But among all men, 
kings, princes and other rulers of the world should 
be more ready to receive this illumination. . . . And 
so it is manifest in considering motion, that all do- 
minion is from God." Whitens History of the War- 
A: fare of Science with Theology gives a picture of 
this hierarchical organization of the heavens ; " Thus 
was the vast system developed by these three 
leaders of mediaeval thought (the Pseudo-Dionysius, 
the Areopagite Peter Lombard and St. Thomas 
Aquinas) ; and now came the man who wrought it 
yet more deeply into European belief, the poet 
divinely inspired who made the system part of the 
world's life. Pictured by Dante, the empyrean and 
the concentric heavens, paradise, purgatory and 
hell, were seen of all men ; the God Triune, seated 



179 

on his throne upon the circle of the heavens, as real 
as the Pope seated in the chair of St. Peter ; the sera 
phim, cherubim and thrones, surrounding the Al 
mighty, as real as the cardinals surrounding the 
Pope ; the three great orders of angels in heaven, as 
real as the three great orders, bishops, priests and 
deacons, on earth ; and the whole system of spheres, 
each revolving within the one above it, and all mov- 
ing about the earth, subject to the primum mobile^ as 
real as the feudal system of western Europe, subject 
to the Emperor/' 

It is from this supposed analogy to the govern- 
ment of the physical universe by the stars, or rather 
by their guiding spirits, that the Papacy was sup- 
posed to sanctify and justify the power of temporal 
princes and these in turn passed down authority to 
all the subordinate rulers of the people. 

The practical objection to teaching this system of 
physics from a scientific point of view, apart from 
its theoretical absurdity, the false conclusions in 
politics and religion which are drawn from it, and 
the dry-rot with which it strikes all true metaphysics, 
is that it gives no place for the modern doctrine of 
force as distinct from or independent of matter. 
Thus Father Harper says in his introduction to the 
Metaphysics of the School (p. XLVIT.): 

" Force is often set before us as a substance, existing 
of itself, and (as it were), in its own right, a concept 
of it, which is consonant neither with the common 
acceptation of the term, nor with the examples of it 
that are subject to human observation.*' 

By no ingenuity can the theory of the transmuta- 



i8o 

tion or conservation of energy as worked out by 
Grove, Helmholtz, Faraday, and others be brought 
under a system which recognizes the force of the 
stars as a sufficient explanation for the attraction 
of iron by the magnet, and no Roman Catholic 
writer, if he were bold enough to insert this modern 
doctrine of force into his system, could thenceforth 
claim that it was the system of St. Thomas. 

To the faithful follower of the latter, the experi- 
ments of our distinguished countryman, Count 
Rumford, whereby he proved that when fire was 
applied to metal, the heat developed did not come 
from the iron, do no exist; see Dr. Plassman's 
Psychology, page i8o. 

Alchemy and astrology were the natural products 
of the teachings of St. Thomas, instead of chemistry 
and astronomy. 

The following extract from Introduction a V His- 
toire de V Asie by Leon Cahun (Paris : Collin & Cie.) 
shows how this philosophy aflfected the most ener- 
getic ot Asiatics, the Turks : 

''While the Europeans, under the spur of Helenism, 
and dazzled by the rediscovery of antiquity, were 
launching boldly out towards the unknown, towards 
free research, towards revolt, the Asiatics, their 
equals till the fifteenth century, let themselves 
docilely be brought back to the School as conceived 
by the sages of the orthodox Khalif. They dis- 
covered as a novelty Aristotle (as deformed by the 
Arabs), they returned to the ' Amalgest,' they 
plunged into Avicenna, their compatriot, they began 
again in Turkish the epoch of the Sassanidae ; they 



l8i 

'marked time/ but never advanced {ils pietinirent sur 
place). All their intellectual activity, and they had 
as much as others, spent itself in scholasticism, in 
jurisprudence, in rhetoric ; with great efforts they 
reconstituted Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen, Hippocrates — 
they hardly dared touch Plato ; to go further would 
have been to lose themselves. Little by little, with 
the help of the monks, they came to think only of 
their salvation and to be content with the Koran." 

St. Thomas frequently cites the ' Amalgest ' and 
Avicenne, above referred to ; need we wonder, then, 
that the Shadow of God on Earth and the Vicar of 
Christ on Earth find so little difficulty in under- 
standing and approving each other's policy ? 

Why should our school teachers be taught from 
text books which cite with approval, as Dr. Plass- 
mann does in his Ps3^chology, page 148, such sen- 
tences as : "• The matter of all terrestrial things is the 
same ; but the matter of the heavenly bodies appears 
to be of a different kind than that of terrestrial 
bodies"? (Summa, I. q. 66, a. 2.) The same princi- 
ples are taught in the Jesuit Seminary, in Woodstock, 
Maryland. For them, Helmholtz has never proved, 
by means of the spectrum, that the stars are com- 
posed of the same elements as the earth. Need we 
wonder at the few practical inventions made in 
Roman Catholic countries ? Aristole considered the 
applied sciences, like the occupation by which a man 
gains his living, vulgar. 

That this whole scholastic physical system is of 
the utmost importance to the Roman Catholic Church 
^s sufficiently apparent ; the doctrine of transub- 



lS2 

stantiation has been formulated upon the belief that 
this system was absolutely true and would continue 
so for all time. But how can we believe that bread 
has a substantial form, and that this form is gene- 
rated by the stars unless Ave believe in astrology ? 
And if we do not believe in astrology, whence comes 
the substantial form of the bread which is removed 
in the Holy Eucharist at the time of consecration, to 
give place to that of our Lord ? One of the argu- 
ments against Galileo in his days was that his scien- 
tific ideas were " leading to a denial of the Real 
Presence in the Eucharist." (White's History of 
Warfare of Science with Theology.) If, on the other 
hand, we adopt the modern theory of atoms, Vv^hich 
has prevailed generally in the scientific world since 
the time of Des Cartes, how is it possible to believe 
in the doctrine of transubstantiation ? So far as the 
author know^s, no attempt has been made to state the 
doctrine of this theory of the physical world. Des 
Cartes is mentioned only with sneers and ridicule 
in modern Roman Catholic literature. 

Nor w^ould the attempt to state the doctrine on 
any theory of nature in harmony with the theory of 
correllation of forces and conservation of energy, be 
more easy ; at all events, it would be as little 
consonant with the teachings of St. Thomas as with 
those of the whole mediseval Church. 

In fact in every Thomistic Roman Catholic argu- 
ment, if carefully considered, will be found this same 
defect, like the spot between Siegfried's shoulders, 
--only in this case it should be designated by a star, 
instead of a leaf. 



i83 

It is therefore submitted that until it is certain that 
these antiquated theories of matter, which were 
evolved from his inner consciousness by Aristotle 
about three hundred years before Christ, and elabo- 
rated in the Dark Ages by the Aquinate, together 
with the social, political and theological theories 
which were based upon them, are positively repu- 
diated by the Church, it is no safe teacher. The at- 
tempt to introduce those theories again into modern 
life can only be compared to the foolish sally of Don 
Quixote, equipped in the armor of a past generation. 

The challenge made by Father Mallebranche three 
hundred years ago, in his Book IV., Chap. III., is 
still unanswered and his criticisms apply as well to 
the Angel of the Schools as to '' the Philosopher ": '' I 
make no question but there are such as honestly 
believe that he whom they style Prince of PJiiloso- 
pliers, is guilty of no Error ; and that his works are 
the magazines of true and sound philosophy. There 
are men who imagine, that in the space of two 
thousand years, the time since he wrote, no man has 
been able to say he has made a blot or been guilty 
of a mistake ; and so making him infallible in a 
manner, they can pin their faith upon him and quote 
him as infallible. But 'tis not worth while to stand 
to answer such gentlemen as these, because their 
ignorance must needs be exceeding gross, and merit- 
ing more to be pitied than oppugned ; I oesire only 
of them, if they know that either Aristotle or any 
of his followers, have deduced any truth from the 
principles peculiar to him ; or if possibly themselves 
have done it, that they should declare it, explain it 



i84 

and prove It ; and I promise them never more to 
speak but to Aristotle's praise and commendation. 
His principles shall no longer be caluminated as 
useless, since they have at least been serviceable to 
prove one truth. But we have no reason to hope 
this, for the challenge has been long since offered, 
and M. Des Cartes, among the rest, has done it in 
his Metaphysical Meditation almost forty years ago, 
and obliged himself to demonstrate the falsehood of 
that pretended truth. And there is great prob- 
ability that no man will ever venture to attempt 
what M. Des Cartes' greatest enemies, and the most 
zealous Defenders of Aristotle's Philosophy never 
yet durst undertake. 

'' I beg leave then after this to say, that it is ^It/id- 
nesSy slavishness of spirit and stupidity ^ thus to betray 
reason to the authority of Aristotle, Plato, or what- 
ever other Philosopher ; that 'tis loss of time to 
read them, out of no other design than to remember 
their opinions : and 'tis to waste that of others too, 
to teach them in that manner. That the Philoso- 
phers cannot instruct us by their authority ; and to 
pretend to is a piece of injustice : That 'tis a kind 
of madness and impiety to take a solemn oath of 
allegiance to them. And lastly that 'tis to detain 
truth in an unjust bondage, from interest and par- 
tiality, to oppose the new opinions of philosophy, 
that may be true, to keep up the cred-t of such as 
are known to be either false or useless." 

Science has no conflict with religion as such — the 
field of one is the intellect, the field of the other is 
the spirit ; but it has a fight to the death against 



i85 

any religion which would substitute logic and au- 
thority for investigation and experience — in short, 
against any religion which would cast it into the 
shackles of Aristotelianism — shackles rusty with the 
blood of tne truth-seekers of a thousand years. 



CONCLUSION. 

It is submitted that the foregoing chapters have 
shown, firstly, that the infalhble voice of Leo XIIL 
has proclaimed anew the most far reaching claims of 
the mediaeval Papacy on the relation of Church and 
State; secondly, tha,t the much lauded social pro- 
gramme of His Holiness consists in the organization 
of priest-guided labor unions, for Roman Catholics 
only ; thirdly, that the Family is to be considered as 
an institution existing independently of the State, so 
that the Litter can do nothing concerning marriage 
or the education of children, except by and v/ith the 
advice and consent of the Church ; fourthly, that the 
individual must in every intentional or rational act 
follow the directions which may be given him by 
the Roman Pontifex Maximus, and that the very ex- 
istence of the independent, spiritual faculty through 
which all men are to be quickened by the Holy 
Ghost is denied ; lastly, the dependence of all these 
propositions upon an exploded astrological concep- 
tion has been set forth. If these are the fair conclu- 
sions from the foregoing lines, does it not seem as if 
the rule of the priesthood over the laity, against 
which the Reformation was the protest, is to be 
reestablished, that the Roman Catholic Church is 
itself guilty of the sins of intolerance which it so 
loudly charges upon its opponents, and that the 
complaints of the Church are in fact the cry of the 
\voIf against the lamb ? 

1 86 



In closing, if a personal remark may be excused, 
the author would say that he is not a member of the 
American Protective Association, and so far as he 
knows has never seen, nor received any communica- 
tion from any member of that Association ; neither 
does he entertain any feeling of hostility to the mem- 
bers of the Roman Catholic Church or to that 
Church as a body. On the contrary, many Roman 
Catholic laymen have honored him with their friend- 
ship, and for the Church itself, as a branch of the 
Holy Catholic Church, he entertains a profound 
reverence and respect, for the centuries of noble 
work which it has done for Christ and humanity, 
through its long lines of consecrated priests, devoted 
monks and holy nuns. 

The only object of these lines has been to show 
that within this glorious institution, hallowed by 
so many beautiful and sacred associations, there is at 
work a corrosive which cannot but in the course of 
time annihilate all that has made it beautiful, glori- 
ous and holy. This evil which has at last, through 
the success of Leo XIII. in making the text-book of 
the Jesuits the text-book of the Roman Catholic 
world, become dominant in the Church, can be de- 
scribed in two words : Aristotelian Scholasticism. 

The Roman Catholic laymen are themselves the 
worst sufferers under this system ; they have no 
more power over the affairs of their parish or dio- 
cese than the Perioeci of Aristotle's Utopia, and if 
the Utopia of Leo XIII. were realized, they would 
have as little power over the Family, the Guild and 
the State. System and discipline are beautiful and 
much to be desired, but is there any teaching in the 



New Testament which justifies man's putting his 
greatest talent, conscience, absolutely in the hands of 
another ? 

Eliminate that false Aristotelian philosophy, and 
who can doubt but that, under the presidency natur- 
ally due to the successor of St. Peter, the reunion of 
Christendom might become an accomplished fact ? 

For with that philosophy would go the ideas that 
primacy must mean infallible absolutism and that 
membership in a political or religious corporation 
involves suicide • of individuality ; that the com- 
munistic Utopias of Aristotle and Plato, with their 
privileged classes of priests, represent the highest 
social organization ; that no state can be trusted 
with the education of its children or the regula- 
tion of its family organizations ; that the whole 
world must have the unanimity necessary in a 
Greek city-state of less than 100,000 inhabit- 
ants ; that men have no way of knowing what is 
right or wrong, except by communications from 
their fellows ; that reason, and not conscience, should 
govern men ; that laymen have no rights which 
priests are bound to respect ; that the principles of 
all scientific truth were grasped by one mind, over 
two thousand years ago — in short that Christianity 
and all modern progress must be built upon the 
quicksand of Aristotelian philosophy. 

Christianity has been adapted to Aristotle, instead 
of Aristotle to Christianity. 

Once cast out these ideas, and again would flour- 
ish as a spiritual refuge for the nations, the Church, 
that mighty tree under whose benignant branches 



i89 

United Christendom for so many centuries sought 
and found a shelter, but which is now, alas, decay- 
ing, — thanks to the worm eating at its heart, — a 
noxious influence on all who trust themselves within 
its shades — a danger to modern civilization. 



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